


Boone

by apparitionism



Series: Boone, et cetera [2]
Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F, S4 fixit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-26 20:42:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1701854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Though it may not seem so initially, this is a sequel to "Sleeping" and an overall fix for S4. And it may look way AU in spots, but I assure you, the show canon will be tied in a BOW. Or possibly a KNOT. Enjoy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Myka Bering lives in Boone, Wisconsin. She is a second-grade teacher. She moved to Boone two years ago, when she could no longer stomach the Secret Service… she was supposed to teach middle-school literature, but they needed a second-grade teacher instead. Desperately. So she is doing the job and becoming qualified for it at the same time… education is, after all, one of the many things she studied for a while. And she does like children, particularly at this age, when they’re just beginning to learn so many of their truly essential thinking skills, when addition and subtraction and even words they already know, like “imagination,” become revelations when they can understand them, read them, on their own.

Myka Bering lives in Boone, Wisconsin, because it’s a wrenching change from her life before. That was what she’d wanted: the biggest change possible. So when she was offered a teaching job—and she’s still not entirely sure why the offer came her way, but she’s trying not to _think so much_ these days—she jumped. Away from D.C., away from the Secret Service, away from all the memories, of Sam and of failure, that would not stop battering her.

Myka Bering lives in Boone, Wisconsin, which is so small that it has only one school. It’s divided into separate campuses, one for the elementary kids and one for the upper grades. General faculty meetings are raucous affairs: too many people with too many different points of view. Myka thinks that they should have separate meetings, just as they do separate campuses.

She thinks that until the day she doesn’t think it anymore: the day when they bring in someone to replace Mrs. Muldowney, the high school literature teacher, who was going to retire at the end of the year anyway but had to move to Florida abruptly for some family emergency. Myka had been hoping to take over that position in the next school year. Yet in this instant, she’s changed her mind about that too, because she is sitting in the back of the conference room as the principal introduces them all to Boone Consolidated’s new high school literature teacher, Emily Lake.

She isn’t even officially introduced to Emily Lake at the faculty meeting, but she can barely concentrate on her students the next day. Because Emily Lake is beautiful, almost heart-stoppingly so. Myka’s heart clenches even now, when she should be paying attention to show-and-tell, just thinking of that impossibly dark hair and those dark-yet-lit-from-within eyes. (Myka’s not a huge fan of the flat Midwestern accent, but if that’s Emily Lake’s only fault…) Myka doesn’t believe in love at first sight. She really doesn’t. That isn’t what this is. This is… captivation at first sight? Yes, something like that.

So she is listening with only half an ear as Adelaide goes on about how her mother gave her this bracelet, which is a family heirloom, and also her father said she could have a lizard as a pet very soon if she promises to take very very good care of it, but not an iguana because they need a very carefully controlled environment. Myka marvels a little that Adelaide can reproduce the words “heirloom” and “controlled environment,” but she is quite verbal, this one. Myka calls her her “top chatterbox,” which is a compliment. Adelaide’s mother, a very smart, agreeable woman, had laughed at that during their latest parent-teacher conference and asked if Myka would mind if she got it printed on a T-shirt for Adelaide.

When Myka finally meets Emily Lake, in the faculty lounge the following week, she thinks that she should get one of those “top chatterbox” T-shirts for herself: she simply cannot stop talking. She babbles on and on, about the school and the town and the fact that there’s only one movie theater and maybe ten restaurants, four of which are Italian, and she doesn’t shut up until Emily says, almost severely, “Myka, would you like to go out with me?”

They go, that evening, to one of the four Italian restaurants. Myka has no idea what she is eating, or even if she is eating; she knows only that Emily is looking at her earnestly, and talking to her about books, and mesmerizing her so that she has not thought about her former life, she realizes, since that afternoon. It is a new record.

Another new record is set when Myka takes Emily home with her—she can’t imagine not doing so—and their bodies are intertwined almost before Myka can unlock her door. It is hours later before they even think about sleep. Myka knows they will both be exhausted at school tomorrow; she is thrilled beyond measure that this is the reason, that they will share their fatigue, the circles under their eyes, the aches of their unrecovered muscles, as secrets between them.

“You’re amazing,” Myka breathes. It is the most true thing she has ever said.

“I’m… just me,” Emily says. “You’re the one who swept me off my feet.”

“That can’t possibly be true,” Myka says, happy that the darkness of the bedroom hides her blush. No, she thinks: I am just happy.

“It’s true,” Emily says, in that serious way she has. “You were so sweet, talking to me, explaining everything, and suddenly all I wanted to do was kiss you.”

“Kiss me now,” Myka says. “Please.”

It happens so fast. There are moments when Myka thinks it’s happening _too_ fast, but then she will look at Emily, and Emily will look at her, and they’ll start laughing, and Myka knows that it’s exactly the right person at exactly the right time, and that can never happen too fast. Only too slowly. And she is afraid, for some reason, that if she goes slowly, it will not happen at all.

Myka bought a new teaching wardrobe when she moved to Boone, but it took her some time to realize that it was all black and taupe and brown and gray, just like her Secret Service suits, broken only by the occasional beige. _Light_ beige, she tells herself now, laughing. Because Emily, who now lives in Myka’s house, has gone through her closet and has made faces at the gloom and is making Myka wear colors like she does, not that they can share clothes, because Myka is so much taller. But they go shopping together, and Emily tells Myka that if she won’t buy that emerald sweater, Emily is buying it for her. And will forcibly put it on her. They have a “threat or promise” discussion on that point.

They take a cooking class together at the pretentiously named “Boone Culinary Institute” because they happen to meet one of the instructors at the mall during a shopping excursion. Myka semi-recognizes the father of one of her students, she can’t quite remember which one, as he enters a classroom down the hall from theirs. They make baba ghanouj and take it home. They agree that it is terrible. Neither can cook, even when guided by the instructor, but neither cares. They are happy.

Until the hour when a beefy man shows up at their door. It is night, and they are about to go to bed. He says he is Secret Service, and Myka is immediately suspicious. His badge, though… his badge is authentic, as far as she can judge (anymore). What can he possibly want with her? She left that life behind, and she has had no contact with her former coworkers, her boss, anyone, since her final debrief.

But he isn’t here for Myka. He’s here for Emily. “I don’t understand,” Emily says. “Does this have something to do with the accident?”

Emily has told Myka that she was in a terrible car accident, one that left her alone in the world, one that took many of her memories and left her with only the barest outline of who she was before. Myka had understood this quite well; she in turn told Emily about Sam and her life before, and how that, too, felt like a terrible accident, one that turned her, Myka, into someone who barely remembered who she was. They had bonded over this: two refugees from violent pasts. Two refugees starting to piece together a future.

There are words about Emily’s safety, something about who was involved in the accident, but all Myka can hear is that Emily is being taken away. From Boone, but more importantly, from Myka. Emily asks this agent whether Myka can come too, but that is, apparently, not an option.

It happens so fast. One minute, they are in a cooking class; now, they are in their bedroom—but no, now it’s going to be Myka’s bedroom, alone, again—and Emily is filling her suitcase, and Myka is asking “Should I try to find you? I shouldn’t, should I, if it could mean that someone might hurt you…”

Emily is crying. She says, “I love you. I didn’t know that I was able to love someone like this, I felt like there was something missing, but I met you and you just made sense. Maybe when… if… they finally decide that everything’s safe… I wish I could remember what happened in the accident. If I could, maybe I could testify against someone, or pick them out of a lineup, or something. But I don’t know what happened. Maybe I’ll never know.”

And she leaves. That night, with that agent, she leaves. Myka has lost not one love, now, but two. She wants to think that this is the end of that kind of thing for her.

She starts feeling bad a few weeks later. Strangely bad; she thinks at first that it is sadness, that she is suffering, literally suffering, from a broken heart. Depression, she expects to hear from her doctor. But after many appointments, many tests, and many weeks during which she feels progressively worse, the diagnosis is cancer. Ovarian cancer. Adding insult to injury. Or injury to injury. It doesn’t matter, she thinks; Emily is gone. Emily is gone, Sam is gone, but cancer is here. She bows to her doctor’s urging: she will undergo an initial surgery immediately. She calls her parents, just to let them know. Her mother cries on the phone. Her father hyperventilates in the background. She wishes she had thought to, or felt that she could, share her earlier happiness with them.

She is almost looking forward to the operating room, for at least, there, she will truly feel _nothing_ for a while. The anesthesiologist is an older woman with a rough voice. She tells Myka, “Here’s what we do: you start counting down from nineteen. My goal is for you to be out before you hit fourteen. Okay?”

“Okay,” Myka says, thinking that these are very strange numbers. “Nineteen… eighteen… seventeen… sixteen… fifteen…” She realizes, fuzzily, that she is fighting as hard as she can against it. There is no point to that. She wants to be oblivious. “Fourteen,” she says. And that is all.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

“Thirteen,” Myka says. She opens her eyes, and for a moment she wonders whether she is blind: there is nothing but darkness. She shifts her head and the rest of her body a bit, and as she does so, she realizes that she is not in a hospital bed, she has not just had surgery, and she does not live in Boone, Wisconsin.

A flashlight shines in her eyes. She is not blind after all. She hears Pete say, “Artie! She’s awake!”

It is still the middle of the night, and she is lying in the crater where the Warehouse used to be. Clearly, she has failed again.

Pete helps her to sit up. She can barely make out his expression behind the flashlight. Artie’s looming behind him, and Myka doesn’t have to see his face to know that he’s disappointed in her. He is thinking that she was wrong, that if he had used the pocketwatch, everything would have worked. She can’t begrudge him those thoughts. She is terrified that he’s right.

Pete says, “You were out for only, like, ten minutes this time. What happened? Was it like the first time, with the weird business about the monks and the great evil and Artie did it and Paracelsus?”

“No,” she says. “It wasn’t anything like that. Except for… wait, I went to that town in Wisconsin again, Boone, where I told you we found Helena before, with that guy and his kid… and the kid, the little girl, I knew her.”

“So was H.G. there too?”

“No, she… well, sort of, but she wasn’t herself. She was Emily Lake.”

“You said she was Emily Lake the first time, too.”

“No, this was Emily Lake like in Wyoming, when she didn’t know us. When Helena was in the coin. So she must have been in the coin already… I wasn’t a Warehouse agent, there… then… so somebody else must’ve stopped Helena’s trident plan. I moved to Boone because I wanted to get away after Sam died. I was a teacher. That little girl, the one you and I found Helena living with, was in my class. But… her mom was still alive. And Emily was a teacher too. And we…”

“You what?” Artie asks. He just sounds weary, as if he knows this is all worthless, that nothing is ever going to be fixed. They had expected the watch to work, but it doesn’t; Myka winds it, but it doesn’t tick. She winds it and she wishes—it’s very hard to control wishing, she supposes—and she finds herself in a different version of the past. While she’s in it, she doesn’t know that it’s different; she remembers nothing about being here in this crater. It is just her life, unfolding. The first time she wished, her life was very much like this one, but they managed to stop Sykes’s bomb from exploding. Then Helena disappeared. It turned out somehow that Artie had reversed time then, but nobody knew, and Artie was possessed and killed Leena, and then everybody in the world almost died. But even after that, Helena was still gone. Then Myka and Pete went to Boone and found her with a new family. Then Myka was diagnosed with cancer…

“And cancer,” she says now. “I had cancer again. And I came back here at exactly the same point, when they were putting me under for surgery.”

“Maybe it’s easier for the watch, whatever it’s doing, to bring you back when you’re under anesthesia,” Artie theorizes. “But it obviously isn’t working, since nothing changes for me or Pete or the Warehouse. Maybe it’s just making you dream.”

“That’s not it,” Myka says. She knows that no dream could exhaust her like this. She staggers under the weight of those two additional timelines, of having been two extra selves…  this self remembers everything from the other two. She can still feel, as a heavy ghost in her body, the difference the cancer made. Both times.

Now, too, the memory of the pain Helena caused her during that first try, and then the sheer giddy joy of her time with Emily Lake in the second, both together threaten to take her over. Or to take her apart. She still feels—in a way that very nearly makes her lie back down again, cold ground be damned, or, really, welcomed—the catastrophe of being in Boone the first time, of seeing Helena being someone else, living her life _with_ someone else, _determined_ to be someone else and live her life with someone else. Myka vividly remembers sitting in the passenger seat of the SUV, Helena disappearing into the night behind her. She remembers almost crying, and then not crying: laughing instead, starting slowly, then feeling it grow into an unstoppable cascade—so unstoppable that Pete pulled off the road because he thought she was having a stroke. “No,” Myka choked out, “I’m fine. I’m not fine, but I’m fine. Just drive.” Because she couldn’t bring herself to say what was funny—and it was funny to her, absolutely _hilarious_ , that she could forgive Helena so relatively easily for wanting to kill everyone on the planet, but she could not imagine, in that moment, being able to forgive her for breaking just one heart.

And then to whiplash from that to what happened with Emily… she can still feel this, too: that she has never in her life been as _simply happy_ as she was with Emily. She knows that she truly loved that woman who looked like Helena, loved living with her, loved _being_ with her in a world where, at least for a while, the stakes were only as high as the two of them wanted them to be. Her feelings were so simple, so pure: Myka simply fell for Emily, with no forbidden-fruit intrigue, no starstruck history-laden fascination. Emily wasn’t tortured or tragic or larger than life. No one held a gun to anyone’s head. And looking back on it now, Myka finds it to have been a strange kind of relief.

She doesn’t tell any of this to Pete and Artie. Yet this is one more thing, she realizes, that she will have to figure out how to tell Helena. If she ever finds a timeline that has both the Warehouse and Helena, her Helena, the real Helena, in it.

“You don’t look good,” Pete says. “Should we… should we just stop? I don’t want you to get cancer for real.”

“I know,” she says. She smiles at him. He looks surprised, and it takes her a minute, but she jolts to the understanding that for him, she’s still the habitually cold Myka, the one who has lost Helena and seemingly everything else. For Myka herself, though, now, that stony Myka is both present and a long-gone memory. She’s beginning to understand the problems people might have with holding more than one timeline in their heads… she’s got three, now, and it isn’t the events that pose the problem, but rather the knowledge that there are _so many_ possible Mykas. She had maintained new, after-the-bomb Myka by denying that old Myka was still there, somewhere, but now she can’t do that anymore. Now she knows those Mykas are here, along with “Helena doesn’t love me” Myka and “I want to marry Emily Lake” Myka; they’re here too. And both of those Mykas now live in horror of Boone, Wisconsin… and that gives here-Myka, now-Myka, an idea.

She asks Pete and Artie, “Does Jane have her Farnsworth on the plane with her?”

“She should,” Artie says. “Why?”

“Please call her,” Myka says. “No, have Pete do it. She’ll want to see he’s okay.”

Once they have Jane’s image on the screen and Pete has assured her that he’s fine, Jane says, “I’m sure I don’t want to hear about whatever complication has introduced itself into the situation.”

Pete says, “No, you probably don’t, but hey, it’s not like we really know what’s going on either. So I guess we’re pretty much where we were before, except for—”

Myka grabs the Farnsworth from him and whisper-shouts at Jane, “What’s in Boone?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Boone, Wisconsin. Something’s there.”

“Well…” Jane says. Is she buying time? Does she already know what this is all about?

“Jane, I have to know. Please.” Myka would fall to her knees if Jane were standing in front of her. It would most likely do her no good, but she would fall to her knees in supplication.

“Why?” Jane asks, quite sharply.

“Myka’s using the watch,” Pete says.

“Using the watch,” Jane repeats. She closes her eyes.

“And I keep going to Boone,” Myka says.

“What do you mean, you keep going to Boone?”

“I’ve relived my life twice. Both times, I went to Boone. What’s in Boone?”

“Myka, all I know about Boone is that we have a Regent there,” Jane says. “She teaches at a cooking school. But I can’t imagine that she would have anything to do with—”

“A cooking school,” Myka breathes. “That wasn’t a coincidence. Oh, god, either time. Cooking class. They were keeping an eye on Helena, on Emily…”

“On Helena?” Jane says. “Helena hasn’t been to Boone. If she had, then yes, the Regent would have kept track of her whereabouts. Regents help keep tabs on potential Warehouse agents as well, which was of course easy for me with Pete, but I don’t see how any of this applies to the situation as it stands.”

“I don’t either,” Myka says, almost to herself. “There’s got to be something else there. That little girl… and Helena… and I get cancer… but I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be doing or finding or fixing!” She practically flings the Farnsworth back at Pete.

“Myka has cancer?” Jane interjects. “The watch is giving Myka cancer?”

Pete says, “Mom, we don’t know. We don’t know anything.” Five-year-old Pete, Myka thinks. She isn’t even tempted to sneer anymore, because they all might as well be five-year-olds: they _don’t_ know anything.

“Except,” Artie says, “it doesn’t work. We know that.”

Jane says, “Didn’t the earlier documentation make clear that it _does_ work?”

“It doesn’t tick, and it hasn’t turned back time!” Artie shouts.

“Except for me,” Myka says. “It turns back time for me.”

“I’ll do it,” Pete announces. “Give it to me. I don’t care if I get cancer.”

“Pete!” comes a maternal squawk from the Farnsworth.

Myka says, “Don’t worry. I won’t let him. I’m trying again.” _What_ she’s trying, she really doesn’t know. Artie and Pete are staring at her, helpless. She thinks, just for a second, _I can’t survive this_ —but she feels the stifling darkness filling the emptiness of the crater, and it is all wrong. She thinks of Helena, thinks of Helena surviving in bronze for _a hundred years_. She winds the watch that doesn’t work, and wishes, one more time, to get it right.

****

Myka Bering lives in Univille, South Dakota. She is a Warehouse agent. She seeks out artifacts, neutralizes them, and brings them back to the Warehouse to be stored safely.

Myka Bering lives in Univille, South Dakota, because at a time when she needed direction, this place of endless wonder supplied it. She has been here almost two years, and while there are days when she still has some doubts about the place and the undertaking and her place in the undertaking, she is on the whole quite satisfied with the life she is living. She is serving a purpose, and she is doing so in the company of people she likes and respects—well, maybe not all the time, because Pete talking with his mouth full is gross and Artie seems to go out of his way, sometimes, to find things to get obsessively grumpy about. Claudia and Leena are wonderful, though, and now, of course, almost out of the blue, there’s also…

Myka Bering lives in Univille, South Dakota, and she thinks she just might be going insane, because as of some weeks ago, one of the people she lives _with_ is H.G. Wells. And while most would find that in itself the crazy part, it isn’t. Not at all. The _crazy_ part is that Myka is terribly afraid—actually, terribly _certain_ —that she is in love with H.G. Wells.

TBC


	3. Chapter 3

A thousand little things, a thousand moments and her reactions to them, have led her to this certainty. The fact that H.G.—no, Helena—is amazing to look at, there is no doubt. That she is amazing to talk to, also no doubt. Myka has, however, met beautiful people, some of whom were quite fine conversationalists, before. Granted, they were not the father (mother!) of science fiction, but that is almost beside the point at this point. At this point, the point is simply that Myka can’t not look up when Helena walks by, can’t not smile when she is smiled at, can’t not leap to Helena’s defense if she is questioned, can’t not hope, with a wildness that shocks her, for Helena to please one more time touch Myka on the arm or the shoulder or breathe inappropriately near her neck or even just please _please_ be closer than across the room.

Myka is trying to keep all this unruly feeling inside, because it is completely distracting, both in itself and because Myka, of course, has always tried so desperately to do everything right, and she is terrified that this is profoundly _wrong_. She knows Artie would think it is wrong, because Artie does not trust Helena. Pete doesn’t fully trust her either, Myka can tell, although he is keeping his doubts quiet. Their misgivings are usually enough to check Myka when her head gets to spinning too fast with thoughts that are not at all about science fiction, not at all about inventions, not at all about abstract ideas of beauty or knowledge or anything but the way her entire body is tuned to a new frequency.

But tomorrow’s going to be different. Tomorrow, Myka and Helena are going to check out a ping. On this mission, there will be no Artie, no Pete, not even Claudia. Myka does not care at all what the artifact is (well, maybe a little; she does still have a job to do), for it will be the first time she and Helena have been sent into the field together as a team. To say that Myka is nervous and excited and on edge is to _gravely_ understate how her whole _being_ is buzzing. She is happy to partner with Pete; she is pleased when she can help Claudia. But she is _in love with_ Helena, and life has been conspiring thus far to ensure that they are never, ever alone.

So Myka doesn’t sleep at all, and she rises after this pointless episode of anticipatory wakefulness with her head foggy. Surely she will snap to, she sort-of thinks, given sufficient coffee. However, in a completely unsurprising turn of events, all it takes is the sight of Helena downstairs in the hallway of the B&B, slinging an overnight bag’s strap over her shoulder, to bring Myka entirely to attention. Helena looks up at her and smiles. That is a double shot of espresso introduced directly into Myka’s adrenal gland. She is hard put not to stagger. She is hard put not to break into song.

Artie rumbles past Helena and shoves a folder at her. “Read up on your way,” he says.

When they are finally, _finally_ in the car together, Myka asks Helena, “So what’s in Boone?” She tries for diffidence, just glancing over at Helena in the passenger seat. She’d imagined letting Helena drive, just to show how different she was from Pete, with his “jokes” about what terrible drivers old people were… but then she’d remembered the one time he actually had let Helena drive. Myka hadn’t really understood the concept of motion sickness, not fully, until that day, and she figures that today, she would really rather be interpreted as slightly Pete-like than be revealed as a green-faced, Dramamine-popping scaredy-cat.

Helena’s answer: “Hm.”

“Is that a good ‘hm’ or a bad ‘hm’?” Myka asks. Is her tone right? Is it light enough? God, she is so completely _uncalibrated_.

Helena looks up and once again favors Myka with a heart-melting smile. Myka is sure that Helena does not smile at anyone else quite like this. She is sure because she has paid careful attention to Helena’s features, how they move and change. She could probably write a decent monograph entitled “Smirks and Quirks: The Facial Expressions of H.G. Wells.”

The smile settles into one of those smirks as Helena looks back at the folder. “It’s neither good nor bad. It’s simply puzzled. Why would those accused of crimes suddenly confess when there is little to no evidence of their having committed said crimes?”

“They have really bad lawyers?” Myka guesses.

“In fact, quite the opposite. In most cases, charges had been dropped against these men, yet they chose to confess anyway. The police department’s ability to close cases and the district attorney’s conviction record are unprecedented.”

“Maybe it’s because it’s a small town where everybody knows everybody, and the bad guys can’t live with the guilt.”

“Yes,” Helena says skeptically. “And because there is such a logical explanation as that, we are on our way to Boone.”

“Well,” Myka says, “I’m pretty happy about that.” She has to fight to keep herself from grimacing, because that statement meant exactly what it said, and it had to have been far too legible.

“I am as well,” Helena tells her. She follows that with, “Inventory does begin to _wear_ on one.”

Myka sighs, and whether it’s in relief or disappointment, it doesn’t matter, because Helena goes on, “I see you agree.”

And that is the drive: Myka semi-obliquely expresses thoughts that she instantly regrets, and Helena (either obliviously or resolutely) does not read them.

In Boone—they arrive in the early afternoon—they meet with two of the confessed criminals’ lawyers, who point them in the direction of a woman who works in the district attorney’s office. Amy Plumb is an ADA, relatively young—early thirties?—smart and clearly ambitious, and Myka imagines she’d be thrilled with how well she, and her colleagues, are doing. Instead, she confides that she’s concerned.

“Something was weird about those confessions. I saw one of the men, right after he turned himself in—he seemed to be actually terrified.”

“Of the consequences of his impending confession? Or of his crime itself?” Helena asks. It’s the first thing she’s said beyond “hello.”

“No, I mean just physically terrified—breathing hard, heart racing. Like he’d seen a ghost. Or a serial killer.” And then she asks the question that Myka has been tired of hearing since, she’s pretty sure, no later than her second case as a Warehouse agent: “But why is the Secret Service interested in this?” Myka, of course, goes into her canned speech about how she can’t say; it’s classified. But she gives Amy Plumb her card and asks her to call if anything weird happens. For example, if someone else shows up to confess.

“Got any ideas?” Myka asks Helena when they’re downstairs in the lobby.

“Enroll in a cooking class?” Helena offers.

Myka must look a bit taken aback by this non sequitur, because Helena gestures to a bulletin board on the wall behind them. A flyer proclaims the wide variety of classes available at the “Boone Culinary Institute.”

Helena adds, with a chuckle, “Simply to pass the time. Until something revealing occurs.”

“My cooking is fine,” Myka says.

“That is not the version of the story conveyed to me by people who have experienced your forays into cuisine.”

“Oh, because you’re some master chef?” Myka retorts. She’s not really stung; she can’t, in fact, cook, and it’s true that every time she tries, some disaster seems to ensue. At least Helena doesn’t know about the disasters. Probably.

“I cannot cook at all. Not in the slightest, hence my suggestion that we educate ourselves. Together.”

“Oh,” says Myka, and that “together” warms her from the inside out. Anything Helena ever says that suggests they might have things in common warms her from the inside out, because it pulls Myka just a little bit further along the road toward acting on her desires. Anything that even begins to lessen the huge temporal, historical, almost _metaphysical_ distance that seems to separate them is another tug on Myka’s sleeve. Someday those tugs will reach critical force, and Myka will end up standing right in front of Helena. And then she will smile and lean down and…

“Myka, your telephone is noising.”

It’s ADA Amy Plumb: someone, somehow, knows that she has spoken to them about her suspicions and has taken it as an invitation to threaten her husband. Myka recommends that she call the police, and her response is, “I can’t. The person making the threats is a police detective.”

“So this detective just called and said he’d harm your husband?”

“No! My daughter called and said that he was at our house threatening her father! If something happens to him, she’ll be alone in the house, and Detective Briggs will find her. You’re armed, Agent Bering. I need your help. Please.”

Myka agrees, of course; when Amy finds out they are still in the lobby, she says she will lead them to her house, where, presumably, Myka and Helena can dispatch the detective. Myka asks Helena, “You okay with all this?”

“Of course,” Helena says. “We’ll save the culinary arts for another time.”

When they reach the house, the front door is open, and Myka can see two men engaged in a struggle in the front hallway; Amy leaps from her car, yelling “Nate!”, and Myka and Helena leap too.

One of the men is wielding a very strange-looking weapon—it appears to Myka to be a prehistoric ray-gun, something made out of teeth and bone. The other man, presumably Nate, is transforming, his face altering, his nails lengthening, and he is shaking, crumpling to the ground, crying out as if in terror. Amy runs to him.

“Daddy?” a smaller, frightened voice says. “Mom?”

They all turn and look. “Adelaide, go lock yourself in a room!” Amy shouts.

It’s enough of an interruption to distract Detective Briggs. Helena throws a quick jab to knock the thing from his hand, and Myka leaps to bag it. But neither is quick enough to stop him from his next act: he grabs the little girl, Adelaide, who did _not_ go lock herself in a room as instructed by her mother, and rushes out the front door with her. They immediately give chase, but he is into his car and away before Myka can draw her weapon or Helena her tesla. “Dammit!” Myka says. They have the artifact, whatever it is, and that’s something—leverage at least—but now they have to deal with a kidnapped little girl.

Myka looks at Helena with some trepidation. A little girl, somewhere around the age Helena’s daughter must have been when… and in fact, Helena does look a little too pale, and worse, a little too determined. Her jaw’s so tight Myka suspects it won’t move at all when she talks. If she talks. Now Myka’s regretting her pathetic romantic eagerness for this just-the-two-of-us mission, because she has a very bad feeling that if something goes wrong… if there’s a child in jeopardy and they can’t save her…

Myka decides to focus instead on making sure that they _do_ save the child in jeopardy.

Amy is as upset as any mother would be under the circumstances, and while Nate has recovered from the artifact’s effects, now he’s terrified for his daughter’s safety. Helena seems ready to charge off in any direction, tesla blazing; she alternates between pacing the length of the Plumbs’ living room and then settling, as she so often does, weirdly close to Myka—normally a situation that Myka would be perfectly happy with, but right now, she reestablishes her own space. Helena’s tension is contagious, and somebody has to stay calm.

Fortunately, it doesn’t take long for Briggs to call and demand the artifact in exchange for Adelaide. (He doesn’t say “artifact.”)

Amy wants to go with Myka and Helena. She claims she’s been to the shuttered store where they’re to meet Briggs, but when pressed, she admits that she actually only saw it on the news. When they closed it. Two years ago. Myka tries to reassure her: they’re highly trained agents, they’ll get Adelaide home safe; but this has little effect, and Nate starts trying to muscle his way into the rescue too.

Helena says abruptly, “You are _wasting time_.”

This stops Amy. In her tracks, almost. Myka can’t read the expression on her face at all; she looks a little like she’s just been slapped out of hysterics, that level of shocked.

“Your daughter will be returned to you,” Helena tells the now-silent woman. She says to Myka, “Come. We have work to do.”

Their drive is tense. When they arrive, though, Myka ventures, “You can do this, right? You’re okay?”

“Far from it,” Helena says. “But I _will_ do this.”

Myka is honestly uncertain as to whether she should believe Helena capable of holding it together. She has never seen her like this before. Focused, yes, apprehensive, yes, but always, always there has been a buoyancy about her, something leavening even what had seemed to be villainous words and actions. Now her movements—even those of her face—are weighted with a ruthlessness of purpose. Myka had thought vengeance an animating, hot, angry thing, but no: it’s cold and dead. She’d thought that expression about revenge being best served cold was about time, about waiting. But no: it’s about heartlessness.

She can’t imagine trying to keep Helena from going in, though—she would probably have to shoot her—so she takes a deep breath and decides to hope for the best. And when they get inside, when they’re actually doing what they came to do, everything works. Briggs said he would be waiting in the manager’s office, and they approach it silently, in perfect concert. “I hear two,” Myka mouths, and Helena nods.

From that point on it’s just _easy_ , the way they take down Detective Briggs and his partner: Myka goes in first, alone, and pretends to be about to hand over the artifact. Then, right as Briggs’s cohort thinks he’s going to succeed in sneaking up behind Myka, Helena bursts in and teslas everybody into unconsciousness, Myka very nearly included. “Hey!” Myka objects, once she recovers from the mild jolt she received. “Cutting it a little close there, weren’t you?”

Helena is oblivious. “We must find Adelaide,” she says.

Myka doesn’t disagree, but she does slump a bit internally, thinking, at first selfishly, of how this experience with Adelaide will in all likelihood _preoccupy_ Helena, particularly tonight, their only night. She tries to let go of that and instead worry about how this experience with Adelaide will _set Helena back_ by reminding her of all that she has lost, all that she was powerless to stop, all that she has seemed to be trying so hard to move forward from. If Helena is this single-minded about a child she doesn’t even know, Myka can barely imagine what she brought to bear on her attempts to bring her own daughter back. The more glimpses Myka gets of that Helena, the more she sees how clearly the Bronzer must have seemed the only recourse.

They search the store, Helena with an almost frenzied intensity, until they at last find Adelaide locked in a back room. Myka wants Helena to pick the lock, but Helena shakes her head and says, “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

Helena holds up her hands. They are trembling.

Myka raises her voice and says, “Adelaide, you need to get away from the door and get behind something solid, okay? I have to shoot the lock to get you out.”

Helena turns her back on Myka when she fires the pistol.

It is while they are asking Adelaide if she is hurt, checking her out to make sure, that something else happens: Helena suddenly bristles; if she were a cat, her back would be up, she is that alert. She takes hold of Adelaide’s forearm and raises her wrist. Adelaide is wearing some kind of metal bracelet. Helena’s voice is very tight as she asks, “Where did you get this?”

Adelaide, having just been kidnapped, is most likely going to be justifiably wary of everyone for quite some time. She asks, “Why do you want to know?”

“Because…” Helena starts. Then she hardens: “No. Please answer my question first.”

Adelaide stares at Helena for a second. “Okay,” she agrees. “But only if you answer mine next.”

“I will,” Helena says.

Adelaide nods. “My mom gave it to me. It’s a family heirloom.”

“Is it,” Helena says. “And of precisely what family is it an heirloom?”

Adelaide, who for some reason is not at all cowed by Helena’s tone, says, “No, it’s your turn now. Why do you want to know?”

“Because I believe I have seen it before.”

TBC


	4. Chapter 4

Myka is fervently glad that Boone is a small town.

Helena, after her pronouncement regarding the bracelet, has clammed up almost completely. “We must return Adelaide home to her mother. Her parents,” she forced out, and that’s been about it. So, having bundled Adelaide into the car as safely as possible, Myka and silent, edgy Helena have begun the seemingly interminable—but really quite short—journey to restore her to her family.

Adelaide, despite her earlier suspicion, or something, of Helena, is now practically chatty. Now that they’ve officially introduced themselves to her, badges and all. She is a clever little thing, though; she points out that “the man who came to our house had a badge too,” but bravado soon kicks in, and Myka almost laughs: “I was scared, but not _that_ scared. The part where you shot the door to that room, Myka, that was the second-scariest part. Or maybe the third-scariest.”

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Myka says. “We just didn’t know where to find the keys.”

“I thought at first you might be more bad guys, but then I remembered that you got the man away from my dad. I saw Helena hit him. Maybe you can teach me to do that, Helena.”

Helena doesn’t answer. Myka dashes a glance at her, but she is almost as tense as she had become when Adelaide was taken. Myka decides to take a risk. “Hey, that really is a cool bracelet you’re wearing,” she nonchalants. “Is it a charm bracelet?”

“It’s a _time_ bracelet,” Adelaide says. “I know all about time. Because of my great-great-great… well, lots of greats grandfather.”

“Oh?” Myka says. “And what did your lots-of-greats grandfather have to do with time?”

“He wrote a book about it,” Adelaide says. “His name was H.G. Wells.”

Myka very nearly crashes the car.

****

She barely has time to come to a stop in the driveway before Adelaide is out of the car and running for her mother; they meet at the midpoint of the front yard.

She turns to question, or just check on, Helena, but she too darts out of the car, a missile tracking toward the embracing mother and daughter. Nate is looking on from the doorway. Myka is struck by his respect for their closeness—she thinks that he must be a decent father.

Then Helena reaches them, and Myka can look at and listen to nothing but her. She hears a tremor in Helena’s voice, low and grave: “Amy, I must ask you… Adelaide claims that she is a descendant of H.G. Wells. Is this so?”

Amy leaves her arms around Adelaide but leans a little in Helena’s direction. “Yes, but… why in the world would that have come up?”

Myka makes it to Helena’s side just as she is gesturing at Adelaide’s wrist. “The bracelet she wears,” Helena says. “It was once… or perhaps I should say, I have seen it…” Myka touches Helena’s arm, and Helena looks her way. Myka tries to give her best “I don’t know what’s going on, but everything is going to be fine!” smile. This makes Helena laugh, just a little, and it apparently gives her enough clarity to go on. “I have seen it. In… old family photographs. _Very_ old family photographs. Because I… I am a Wells. As well. Ha,” she laugh-coughs.

Amy reaches out a hand now, and she touches Helena’s face. Weirdly, at least to Myka’s eyes, Helena doesn’t flinch. “You _are_ ,” Amy says. “I knew there was something. I heard it.”

“Whose bracelet was it?” Myka asks, though it is very clear to her that its original owner is standing in the middle of a beautifully tended suburban lawn in Boone, Wisconsin.

“My grandmother told me that the bracelet belonged to H.G. Wells’s sister, but she died young. It was important to her, so he kept it, and he gave it to his oldest son’s first daughter,” Amy says. “That is, my grandmother. And Helena, you… you sound just like her. _Just_ like her. It’s like having her back again—well, younger than when I knew her, of course, but I… I mean, I never recorded her voice. I never thought to do it. And after she died, I would have done anything to hear it again. And now I have. And it just… it’s just funny. How the world works. Isn’t it?”

“Your grandmother,” Helena says. Myka does not understand how she is still upright; there is no blood in her face at all. “She must have been Gip’s daughter. Gip. He was only a baby when… ha!” She barks another strange laugh. “Little George Phillip, G.P., that was why he was called Gip… do you know, he was named George, after—” Helena’s voice breaks, fails. She breathes a sob.

Adelaide asks, “Is that the G in H.G.? Is it George?”

“Yes,” Helena says. “In fact, it is.”

Now Myka is crying too. She realizes now, fully realizes, that Helena is standing among her _family_. If Myka had just seen Helena and Adelaide together, she might not have thought them related at all. But by triangulating through Amy, Myka can see that there is indeed something familial linking the three of them, something in the mixture of gestures and features—Amy’s hands move like Helena’s; Adelaide’s nose is like Amy’s; and now, she sees Adelaide twist her neck in a way that suggests she’s already been given several tutorials by Helena.

“And you, Amy,” Helena says. “Your name. That was the name of your several-greats grandmother, the wife of—of the historical H.G. Wells.”

Amy says, warmly, “You do know. You know us. So you know me, and you know Adelaide.” She cocks her head toward her husband. “And Nate, too, even though he laughs at the idea of all this fancy English family.”

“Hey!” Nate protests. “I’m fine with you guys being gentry, or peers of the realm, or whatever you call it.”

Helena says, “Hardly that. There were barely even servants, most of the time.”

Amy laughs. “I try to tell him, but he’s convinced that everybody in England has a castle and a moat.”

Adelaide, of course, is thrilled at that idea. But she’s even more thrilled when Helena suggests that, in lieu of providing access to the nonexistent family castle, she could possibly be convinced to teach Adelaide how to “hit bad guys really hard.”

“But you need not hit them _hard_ , darling,” Helena says. “You need only hit them _correctly_.”

“Can she come live with us?” Adelaide asks her mother.

Amy says, “I think Myka might have an opinion about that.”

Myka blushes. Helena laughs. It is everything at once, this day.

And all at once, it _is_ everything at once; Myka feels the weight of it, and if she is feeling it so heavily, Helena must be ready to double over. “I think we might need to call it a night,” Myka says. “And maybe Adelaide should too? It’s been a pretty interesting day.”

“Will you come back for breakfast?” Adelaide asks. “I like having another cousin from England. I never see my other ones.”

“Please do,” Amy adds. “It’s selfish of me, but… I want to listen to your voice.” She smiles in apology. Myka thinks that it is sweet that she feels guilt about this… but who wouldn’t want to listen to Helena’s voice? “And also get to know you, you and Myka. Adelaide’s right, we never see the English cousins or their loved ones.”

It takes Myka a beat before she can gather herself to say, “Oh, we’re not really…” but then Helena jumps in with, “If Myka has no objection, that would be delightful.”

How in the world could Myka have any objection?

****

When they reach their room in the hotel, Helena sits on the bed. Myka sits beside her. They are simply tired, tired together. Helena leans against Myka, and as naturally as breathing, Myka’s arm loops around Helena’s body. As involuntarily as her heart beats, her head turns and she nuzzles a kiss into Helena’s hair.

“Myka,” Helena exhales.

“Hm,” Myka says. Her eyes have closed. She is wondering how she will ever bring herself to move again.

“Did you just kiss me?”

And maybe that question would have made her jump, this morning—she wouldn’t have kissed Helena this morning, of course, though god knows she’s wanted to, every other second, for weeks—but now it barely makes her eyelids flutter. “Yes,” she tells Helena’s soft, soft hair. “And I want to kiss you again.”

But Helena pulls away. “Before you do,” she says. “That is, if you still want to, once I.” She looks Myka in the eyes, and Myka can tell she is about to hear a confession of some kind. She wishes she were anonymous behind a screen; whatever it is, she doesn’t want to be the one to hear it. She wants to go back to ten seconds ago, when everything was a brand-new, yet somehow familiar, exhausted haze.

But she wants Helena more. If this day has shown her anything, it’s that she wants all of Helena, all her history and damage and pain and the way she is fighting it and accepting it at the same time. If Helena needs to say something, then Myka will learn to accept that too. And fight it, if that’s what needs to be done.

“Okay,” Myka says. “Tell me.”

“A plan,” Helena says. “A plan.” Now she won’t meet Myka’s eyes.

She needs help, Myka thinks. “Can you start with the bracelet? When did you get it?”

This makes Helena start to cry. Myka had thought that she would be decorous even in distress, but if today has taught her anything, it’s that when Helena’s mask falls, it _falls_. It shows Myka just how much effort it requires for Helena to maintain it as seamlessly as she usually does.

“Okay,” Myka says. “Can you tell me who gave it to you?”

At this, Helena smiles. “My teacher. My teacher, that is, at the Warehouse: Caturanga.”

“I’ve seen his name in the files,” Myka says. “He was like Artie, wasn’t he?”

Helena returns to her steely self, briefly but completely, as she says, “I assure you, he was not at all like Artie.”

“I just meant—”

Helena’s lips quirk back up. “I know. And you are correct. Like Artie, he had such knowledge of the Warehouse and its artifacts, and he taught us all wondrous things.”

Myka tries again. “What about your brother? I didn’t know his son was named for you.”

Helena smiles at this, too. “It was a very Charles way to think: by giving his firstborn that name, he would bring me back around to appreciating my family.” The smile fades. “It had the opposite effect: I could not see baby Gip without thinking him a pale imitation of my lost Christina, as if Charles had produced a child through some misguided attempt to replace her. I responded quite poorly. I know I frightened him, then. I frightened everyone. Even Caturanga, my teacher… he tried, at first so gently, and then so desperately, to curb my worst excesses. That was the intent of the bracelet; he knew I was frantic to perfect my time machine so that I could change the past. He told me that I should wear it and be reminded that time cannot be controlled, only experienced.” Her eyes are wet with tears again. “He told me, he _showed_ me, that all of the mechanisms we use to represent time to ourselves, to mark its passage, are such reminders.”

“And you ultimately heard him,” Myka says. “Didn’t you? Wasn’t that why you decided to… take yourself out of the equation? Weren’t you sort of forcing yourself to do that, to experience time instead of trying to control it?”

“But the _plan_!” It is an anguished, if muted, wail.

“You have to tell me what you’re talking about,” Myka says, despite what she really wants to say, which is, I’ve heard enough, let’s just go to sleep, we will wake up in a new day, like you have, this is your new day, you have to believe that now. But she doesn’t say that. She says, “Tell me, and we will work it out. Just tell me.”

“I was planning to end the world.” Both shame and something like pride color her voice. It is the purest expression of Helena Wells that Myka can imagine.

What ensues is a story that Myka tries, but at certain points fails, to follow: there is a trident in pieces, Christina’s coffin, something about a vest, and Warehouse 2 in Egypt. At the mention of Egypt, Helena exclaims, “Those boys!” and lunges for her phone. She frantically makes calls that Myka gathers are aimed at stopping some dangerous part of this world-ending plan.

After all of it, they are exactly where they began: sitting side by side on the bed. Myka cannot begin to judge the distance between the exhaustion she feels now and what she felt when they first entered this room—she’d thought that she and Helena were both emotionally drained then, but now everything has been made so much larger.

And yet Helena is smaller, even physically so; she sits, slumped, not touching Myka now. She shouldn’t be smaller, Myka thinks, considering the enormity of her plan, its maniacal elaboration… she really _is_ a genius. Myka is trying not to wonder what would have happened if they hadn’t come to Boone, hadn’t met Amy and Adelaide. Would Helena have gone through with it? She clearly is not the sort to reconsider her chosen direction unless pushed— _forced_ —to do so.

Myka suspects that her own infatuation has kept her from picking up on hints that Helena was not all that she seemed—or rather, that she was more than she seemed. And she had all along seemed to be so much.

So Myka is sitting beside someone who resembles, but is actually very different from, the person with whom she was certain she was in love. She had never thought that _that_ H.G. Wells would make it easy on her, of course, but she _had_ thought that her own side of it, the love she felt, was simple.

It isn’t simple anymore.

TBC


	5. Chapter 5

Myka is looking at the moon. The moon in Boone, she thinks; it sounds like a children’s book. Pete would like it. _The Moon in Boone_. Someday Pete’s going to read a book like that to his kids… Myka can take kids or leave them, herself, but she can’t imagine Pete not having any.

She is looking at the moon from the vantage of a plastic chair on the porch outside the motel room. The motel room she is sharing with Helena. _Their_ motel room. Which she had imagined more than a little differently this morning, this afternoon, even earlier tonight.

Helena is asleep inside. Or maybe she’s feigning sleep; Myka doesn’t trust herself to tell the difference. In any case, Helena is inside, in bed, and Myka is out here. Gazing upon the moon in Boone.

When Myka was nine, she spent several months wanting to be an astronaut. All the attention back then was on the space shuttle, however, and that made her angry. She had wanted to go to the moon. Even now, some part of her wants to go to the moon. But wanting to go to the moon, even making a plan to go to the moon, gets you exactly nowhere. You have to carry out your plan: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, exosphere… spaceosphere? Then the moon. You haven’t gone to the moon until you’ve gone to the moon.

Ergo, making a plan to do a terrible thing, even taking some of the steps in that plan, does not mean that you have done the terrible thing. The fact is that the world is still here, not destroyed, not in the throes of some new ice age.

The moon in Boone… a trip to the moon… no, that’s Verne. Helena dislikes Verne, she said so… although somebody who makes happy noises about post-it notes when she’s secretly planning to destroy the world probably says “dislike” when what she really means is “totally in love with”… because opposites… and reasoning…

Myka opens her eyes. Helena is standing in front of her, silhouetted by the moon, haloed by stars. “Myka,” she says.

“Are you okay?” Myka asks, groggily. She doesn’t know when she fell asleep. Something about Jules Verne…

“I came to ask you the same thing. If you want me to leave, I will.”

“Want you to leave?”

“You’ve been out here for hours. I understand your not wanting to be near me, now, but I should be the one to leave, not you.”

“I fell asleep. That’s all.” She is still sleep-fuzzed, and looking at Helena in the moonlight isn’t helping her gather her senses.

“Still, I should go.”

Myka’s brain starts back up: if Helena leaves, she won’t come back. If she leaves now, it’s the end. “No,” she says.

“No?”

“You don’t get to make me fall in love with you and then drop a bomb on me and leave. That’s not how it works.”

“Isn’t it?” Helena asks.

Myka shakes her head. “Unless.”

“Unless what?”

“Unless making me fall for you was part of it. If it was, then yes, you should leave.”

“I want to be honest,” Helena says.

Myka tries to steel herself, but instead she feels her heart, or possibly her soul, begin to wilt.

Helena turns away from her to pace the length of the small patio. She is wearing a huge gray T-shirt, purple pajama pants, and red slippers. Myka wishes she could laugh at the getup, just laugh and tell Helena how silly she looks and sweep her up and take her to bed. But Helena wants to be honest. (Maybe.) Myka wonders if there is any chance that that now-involuntary “maybe” could possibly ever fade over time.

“I do want to be honest,” Helena says, as if in response.

“Then be honest,” Myka says.

“That usually ends badly.”

“Helena,” Myka says. “As I’m pretty sure I just said out loud, I am in love with you. And probably for the next few hours, at least, that’s going to keep being true. So I really think there is not going to be a better time. I really think, as receptive audiences go.”

Helena takes a deep breath. “Theplanwastogainyourendorsement.” She takes another. “AndIthoughtflirtingwouldbeharmless.” One more. But this one she just exhales.

“It wasn’t.”

“I know. I do know. Truthfully, at the start, I needed your help, and I tried to ensure that I would get it. And you liked my flirting with you.” She is almost accusatory.

“I did,” Myka agrees. She had been as terrified that it would stop as she had been for it to continue.

“But recently,” Helena says, “it has all been… different.”

“Yes,” Myka says. “If it had just been like it was at first, I wouldn’t have… well, this. This trip. You knew what I wanted this trip to be. You knew what I wanted to happen.”

“I didn’t know. I might have _thought_.”

“Would you have let it happen? If this had just been some stupid artifact retrieval, without Amy and Adelaide, and if afterwards, in that room in there, if I had just… would you have let it happen?”

“I don’t know,” Helena says. “I don’t know, I swear it. I didn’t have a plan for that, because that was never part of the plan.”

Myka clears her throat. “Okay,” she says. “I believe you.”

“You do?”

“Partially because I really want to believe you. But mainly? Because I don’t want you to leave. And I don’t think you want to leave either.” It _is_ different now, and Myka finds that she does not completely hate the difference. She has some power now. Not the upper hand, not the high ground. She is not pushing Helena; she is not judging Helena. But neither is she idolizing—or idealizing—Helena. Everyone is standing on the same ground. No one is on the moon. “You said, before, that if I still wanted to.”

“It will make the situation even more complicated,” Helena warns.

“I know,” Myka says. “And I wish I could be romantic and say ‘I don’t care,’ but I do care. But I also have feelings for you, feelings that I don’t even know how to name, that are so enormous that I have to _do something_. Maybe the something ought to be that I get in the car and drive ninety miles an hour away from you until I run out of gas. Maybe I ought to go find a shooting range and fire with no ear protection until I can’t hear anything, especially not your voice. Or maybe I should start drinking, or crying, or screaming, and never stop.” She’s still sitting in the plastic chair, but she’s shaking with the effort it takes to hold herself back, hold herself together.

“You should rather do any of those things,” Helena tells her, with a harshness that says she is already well into punishing herself. She parks herself in front of the chair and looks down at Myka.

“I should probably do all those things,” Myka concedes. “But I’m doing this instead.” 

She had no idea that such complicated feelings could compel her to such simple, basic actions. But this is something she has learned today. She stands. Her hands reach for, and find, Helena’s body. Her mouth covers Helena’s. It is the beginning.

****

The next morning, the next awkward morning (“Hello,” they say sleepily and happily to each other upon waking, naked, together, then immediately get confused about who should be entitled to the bathroom first), they share the promised breakfast with Amy, Adelaide, and Nate. Myka worries herself almost sick with the idea that Amy will be instantly able to tell that something is different, that something is wrong—but she seems so thrilled to have Helena there at all that any discomfort between Helena and Myka simply does not register.

On the drive back to Univille, they talk on and off. Not a lot. Myka envies her yesterday-morning self, the simplicity and straightforwardness of that self’s worries. She also, in a way, envies that self her anticipation. Today’s self has slept with Helena. Today’s self is the self that has already had that first time. The way that it happened is the way it always will have happened. (It happened slowly at first, then quickly. It happened like normal people, which she for some reason had thought would not be so: she had laughed at the wrong moment, Helena had used her teeth in the wrong place. They had each said “sorry” more than a few times. But Myka has seen nothing in her life more beautiful than Helena’s face, right before… and then right after, as they were moving so slowly, feeling so warm and so weak and so peaceful together.) Myka knows that right now, she would give just about anything to feel that again. To feel that always.

When they get home, the only person who can obviously tell that something is different is Pete. (Leena probably can too, but she is blessedly discreet.) “I guess Wisconsin’s really _romantic_ this time of year,” he says to Myka.

“Please don’t,” she says.

“Why not? This is the best opportunity for grief-giving _ever_. I’m totally gonna mess with H.G. like there’s no tomorrow.”

Myka grabs him by the arm. “ _Please_ don’t,” she says again. “Please. I want this to work, but it’s… fragile. Please.”

He’s not dumb; he sees how serious she is. His teenage expression turns more adult. “If it’s that important to you, and you’re that worried? I might have to have a serious _sit-down_ with H.G., but I won’t mess it up for you. You shouldn’t worry so much, though.” He smiles. “She would totally check the ‘yes I like you’ box.”

Myka is, actually, pretty sure about that too. But that doesn’t make it any easier. There is more “sorry”; there is more awkwardness; there is more nervous laughter. There are tentative overtures that too often lead to nothing at all. But sometimes, also, there is desperate need: there is Helena’s skin (there is Helena’s skin under Myka’s mouth); there is Helena’s mouth (there is Helena’s mouth moving against Myka’s); there are Helena’s hands, touching Myka everywhere.

There is forward motion. And just like that, there is one month. There are retrievals; there is a visit to Boone. There is another month. There is at last a kind of rhythm to the days, a settling, a pushing to the side of anything more than a normal Warehouse level of apprehension.

And then, one night, there is a phone call. It is Nate, calling from Boone for Helena, but Helena is still at the Warehouse. Nate tells Myka: there’s been an accident. Amy was out on her evening run, right in their neighborhood, and a drunk driver… he can’t go on; he breaks down into sobs. Eventually he manages to ask if Myka could please tell Helena to call, to talk to Adelaide?

Helena calls. Helena spends hours on the phone with both Adelaide and Nate. Then Helena and Myka go to Boone, three days later, for the funeral. They reach the motel late at night, and by coincidence or fate, they are given the same room they stayed in before. Myka can’t help but stare at the bed, their first bed. Of only four: the others are the one in her room at home, and those of two other hotel rooms. She realizes she needs only her two hands to count the number of times they have made love. It has been slow, the build of their relationship, slow and not at all steady. But it has been building.

That night, before the funeral, all they do is sleep. Or rather, all they do is lie in each other’s arms without sleeping.

They arrive early at the church for the service. Nate and Adelaide are in the nave, looking lost. Adelaide sees Myka first, and she smiles a little; then she sees Helena, and she bursts into tears and runs for her. They collide in sorrow, and Nate joins them, a family together in their grief.

Myka stands to the side. It is awful in so many ways.

She and Helena barely have time to speak to each other until that night, when they’re back in the motel. Helena is looking everywhere but at Myka when she says, “I’m staying.”

“Staying?” Myka asks, even though she knows exactly what Helena means.

“Here. For Adelaide. Nate, too. They need help.”

“Okay,” Myka says. Her heart is not breaking; no. Breakage is too clean. It has sharp edges. Myka’s heart is being ripped, torn, pulled apart into ragged, messy pieces.

“I spoke with Artie earlier today. He expressed his understanding. It will be something like a… leave of absence.”

A leave of absence, Myka thinks. Absence. Yes. Helena will leave. She will be absent.

They are in the same bed they shared the first time; their bodies join again, more knowledgeably than they did then. And yet this is far worse than that time, worse even than the most ridiculous, clumsy, inelegant times, for even those were a step along the road to the future. This is a terminus. Maybe it’s temporary. But maybe it isn’t.

Myka drops Helena off at the house the next morning. She gets out of the car to hand her luggage out, to hug her, to kiss her one last time. They are both crying. Helena says she will call. Myka says she will visit. It is almost as awful as the funeral.

****

They do call, sometimes. Myka visits once. But it is clear to her that Adelaide and Helena have bonded in a way that Myka can’t begin to get in the way of. She doesn’t want to get in the way of it, not really. She can’t begrudge either of them the comfort they’ve found in each other. Both Myka and Nate are bystanders… but at least, Myka thinks with the bit of bitterness she allows herself, Nate gets to be there all the time. It’s his house.

So Myka goes back to Univille. And if she’s more tired than usual, it’s hardly a surprise; her heart is still torn apart, and she doesn’t see how it can ever mend. If Pete asks “are you okay” more often than usual, all she can do is say “not really.” Until a day comes when she feels a pain that fells her, and it fells her at the wrong time, during a chase when Pete could have been hurt by her failure to have his back.

She goes, now, to the doctor. She goes, eventually, to lots of doctors. Pete cries when she tells him the diagnosis: ovarian cancer. That she has to have surgery. Then he asks, “What did H.G. say?”

And Myka has to tell him that she and Helena haven’t spoken in two weeks. That that isn’t unusual. That Helena has other people to worry about.

“You’re being stupid,” Pete tells her.

Myka can be as stubborn as anyone, when she wants to be. And right now, she wants to be. (She is also smart enough to know that somewhere, in a deep, snarling part of her, is the idea of this as _payback_. Because Helena is not the only one who can _keep secrets_.) “She is dealing with a lot. I am not going to add to that.”

“ _You_ are dealing with a lot. More than a lot. What if something goes wrong with the surgery? What am I supposed to tell her?”

“First, thanks for the optimism. Second, you’ll tell her what happened.”

He stares at her like he’s never met her before. Then he shrugs and says, “If that’s what you want me to do.”

Myka hugs him. Hard. And wishes, almost as hard, that she could love him as she loves Helena.

Pete, Leena, Claudia, and Artie all go with Myka to the hospital. They can’t imagine that she would prefer to be alone. As she is wheeled toward the operating room, she hears bits of sentences: “—gonna be okay—”; “—really tough—”; “—H.G will see—”. It’s this last that stays with Myka, that runs through and around her brain as she is counting down, waiting to lose consciousness. “H.G. will see,” Myka says instead of “fifteen.” “Helena will see,” she says instead of “fourteen.” “Helena.”

****

Myka opens her eyes. “Helena,” she says.

“Did you find out?” Pete asks, looming over her in a moonless dark that is beginning, just beginning, to thin into gray.

“Find out,” Myka says. “Find out?” She is outdoors. The crater. One more time. This time, she feels relief so profound that she can barely sit up.

“What you needed to find out,” Pete says. Artie is pacing behind him, looking at Myka, looking back down at the ground again.

Myka realizes she is grasping the pocketwatch tightly, so tightly that she fears she could deform it. That won’t do now. Not now. “Yes,” she tells Pete, Pete and Artie both. “I found out. I know what’s in Boone.”

TBC


	6. Chapter 6

Tempus fugit. Time flies; time flees. Fugit irreparabile tempus. Time flees irretrievably. Myka is trying to retrieve it, but she knows she can’t; these extra lifetimes have shown her that. Even her freakish memory can’t hold it all. Nothing can bring it all back. Her life with Emily: gone. Her affair, or something, with the Helena who confessed her plan: gone. Her first discovery of Helena in Boone with Nate: gone. That at least is blessedly gone, yes, but it all flees.

And the timeline she has clung to as “real” is fleeing too, getting farther and farther away, as she lives more of these lives. She has to hurry, before it recedes so far, becomes so distant, that it’s just another in this series of strange sequential-yet-coexistent selves that she now is. That she now has become. That she now has been. There are no tenses for what is happening, no conjugation that can truly encompass it.

So she has to hurry, but not because she is running out of time—instead, she is filling up with time, and time is running out of _her_. Too much time, too many times. The right time is flying, fleeing. She has to hurry.

Myka holds the pocketwatch in her hand, holds it out to Artie. “Who can fix this? You or Claudia?”

“Fix it?” Artie says. “Fix it how? We don’t know what’s wrong with it.”

“It’s missing a part,” Myka says. “If you had the missing part, which one of you can fix this watch faster?”

She sees that Artie wants to be the one to do it, but after a second, he sighs out, “Claudia.”

“Okay,” Myka says. “Pete, we’re picking up Claudia, and then we’re going to Boone. You drive. Drive fast.”

The drive should take five hours. Pete does it in four.

During that four hours, Pete and Claudia keep telling her to explain. And Myka tries, she really tries; she is losing her hold on which timeline is which, what happened to which Myka in which timeline, but Boone is always crystal clear. Eventually they seem to understand that part of it. They know who Amy, Adelaide, and Nate are. Claudia is angry with the Helenas who ended up in Boone, both of them. Myka tries to justify: “It was family,” she says, “even though she didn’t know it the first time. But blood knows.”

Claudia says darkly, “Blood should at least have told you where she was. Also, blood shouldn’t have been messing around on you in the first place. Why would she do that?”

The Myka of that timeline had asked the same question, over and over, until it hardly made sense as words anymore. And the words she came up with in response had made even less sense as answers: inertia, exhaustion, loneliness, boredom? Love? But that Myka knew, and this Myka knows, what Helena in love looks like. She knew, she knows, what Helena in love looks like, sounds like; she knew, and knows, intimately, with certainty. And that wasn’t it. She settles for telling Claudia this: “I don’t know why she did that. Nobody seemed to be acting completely like themselves in that timeline.”

Pete is angry with the Mykas who didn’t tell Helena about the cancer. He then moves on to being angry with the cancer itself, and then with the pocketwatch for “being some cancer machine, too.”

“If it is,” Myka tells him, “I can’t do anything about it. Maybe that’s the downside. If it is, I will handle it. But I think this pocketwatch and I don’t have a lot of choice about what we’re going to do, not anymore. We’ve worked too hard to get here.”

Pete snorts, “You and the watch are such buds now?”

“It kept trying,” Myka says, and though it sounds strange, she forges ahead, “to show me what was in Boone. But it needed me and Helena there at the same time. It got it all wrong the first time, somehow, and the second time, it was Emily Lake without Helena. It took until this last time to get all the parts moving together.”

****

Myka rings the doorbell of the house that is, that has been, so many different things to her: where Helena betrayed her with Nate, where they found Amy and Adelaide, where they lost Amy, where she and Helena lost each other. Where they lost each other twice. She does not know what to expect.

Nate answers the door, and Myka knows immediately: Amy is dead now, dead here, too. “Nate, I’m so sorry,” she says, almost involuntarily. She’s not enormously fond of Nate in any timeline, but this version of Myka, having lost what she has lost, understands this version of Nate far better now.

“Do we know each other?” asks the man who’s stolen Helena twice.

Myka shakes her head. “But I know Amy,” she says.

“Who are you?” he demands. “Why are you talking about my wife? She’s dead.”

“I know. I know. And I… well, this: I need to speak to Adelaide. It’s very important.”

“What is this about? Who _are_ you?”

Myka says the first true thing she can think of: “It has to do with the Wells family.”

She feels a nudge in her ribs. It’s Claudia. “Look,” Claudia whispers. She points behind Nate.

She’s been concentrating on him, so she hasn’t noticed the little girl coming to lurk in the hallway. “Thank god,” she says. “Adelaide.”

Adelaide emerges from behind her father. She’s still in her pajamas—oh, Myka realizes, because it’s actually barely past breakfast time, Pete drove that fast. “I heard you,” Adelaide says. “What about the Wells family?”

Myka looks at Adelaide’s wrist, and her heart seizes. She almost faints. “Where’s your bracelet?” she chokes. “Where’s your time bracelet?”

Adelaide looks shocked, then suspicious. “How do you know about it? I haven’t worn it since my mom died. I put it away. I don’t want to see it ever again.”

The last part clicks into place for Myka: this is why Helena had no idea, in that first crazy timeline. She never saw the bracelet. She never knew who Adelaide was. It was purely blood calling to blood; there was recognition, there had to be, but it was completely blind.

And yet the bracelet still exists. The relief from that realization weakens Myka almost as dramatically as her reawakening in the crater four hours ago. She says, “How I know about it is a _very long story_ about a relative of yours, someone from the Wells family. But I know that you have it, and I also know that what’s on it aren’t charms; everyone thinks they’re charms, but they aren’t, are they?”

“Maybe,” Adelaide says.

Adelaide is still Adelaide, but Myka sees that her interest is piqued; she wants to find out what Myka really knows. “They’re pieces of clocks and watches. Numbers and wheels and hands. That’s why it’s a time bracelet.”

Adelaide nods. “That’s why.”

Myka holds up the pocketwatch for Adelaide to see. “One of the things on it is a piece from inside this pocketwatch. I need that piece, because the watch won’t work without it.”

“Why does it matter if some old pocketwatch works?”

“It matters more than you can imagine,” Myka says. “Please. It will help me help some people who are very important to me.”

“People you love?”

“Yes. People I love.”

“A lot? Like my dad loved my mom?”

Myka smiles. “Yes. One of those people, I love just like your dad loved your mom.”

“Is it your husband?”

“No.”

“Is it your wife?”

“Maybe sometime,” Myka says, a little dreamily. She laughs. “If I’m lucky. If I get this right, and if I’m very very lucky.”

Adelaide moves her head like Helena does. Did. Would. Will. She looks Myka up and down. “What’s your name?” she asks.

“I’m Myka. And that’s Pete, and Claudia. They’re going to help me.”

Myka is starting to itch. Or maybe it’s the pocketwatch in her hand that’s itching, knowing it’s so close to being made whole.

“I’ll go get my bracelet,” Adelaide says.

****

It is at Amy’s kitchen table, the table at which Myka and Helena ate breakfast one first self-conscious morning after, that Claudia takes the pocketwatch apart. She is delicate, deliberate, even with all of them hovering around her.

“Don’t you need gloves?” Pete asks.

“It isn’t bifurcated,” Myka says. “It’s _broken_.” She watches Claudia sort through the metal on the bracelet, sees her recognize one piece. Myka scrutinizes the small cutter Claudia uses to break the loop holding it to the bracelet. She’s seen that cutter before, but not in Claudia’s hand. She examines the other tools more closely… and she knows whose hands they belong in. “Where did you get these?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Claudia nods, “they’re H.G.’s. I stole ’em from the Warehouse ages ago.”

“This has to be right,” Myka breathes. “I couldn’t have arranged it all like this. This has to be right.”

Adelaide asks Claudia, “What piece are you putting in?”

“It’s this little gear thingy here,” Claudia says. “I read up on all this on the way here, while Myka was telling some crazy stories. It’s called the crown wheel. See, it helps turn this wheel here, which turns the next one, and so on like that through the whole watch.”

“So have you fixed watches a million times?” Adelaide asks, enraptured.

“Not once,” Claudia says. “But you can learn anything from the Internet these days.”

Adelaide says, “I want to learn how to fix watches from the Internet too.”

Nate says, to no one in particular, “She hasn’t been this interested in anything since… well, in a while.”

Claudia says to Myka, somewhat sotto voce, “The kid’s all right, but I don’t see what H.G. saw in that guy.”

“That didn’t sound nice,” Adelaide says. “He’s my _dad_.”

“There’s some history, kid,” Claudia tells her.

“When isn’t there history?” Adelaide asks.

Claudia looks up at Myka. “Is it just me, or is this kid weirdly profound?”

****

Ten minutes later, Myka is standing in Nate and Adelaide’s front yard. She has the pocketwatch in her hand. She hates this yard, loves this yard, has no idea how to feel about this yard. But part of the Wells family lives here, lived here. It’s where this has to happen.

The pocketwatch feels warm, almost as if it has a pulse somewhere beneath its hard metal shell. Maybe it’s just that she’s so accustomed to its feel in her hand, as if it’s become part of her palm now.

“It’s time,” she says to it, and it doesn’t matter that Pete and Claudia, and Nate and Adelaide too, are looking at her and listening to her. Or, what they’re actually doing: staring at her and not believing their ears because she sounds so crazy. Even to herself, she sounds crazy, talking to a pocketwatch, or to herself, or maybe she’s really talking to Helena, across all this time that has to be turned back. “I fixed you,” she says. “I will always have been the one to fix you. Please remember that.”

She winds the watch. Unlike all the times before, a light resistance pushes back against her fingers. The watch wants to begin, but the spring must first take tension.

And so, now, wound and tense for the first time in a hundred years, it shudders through one tick. Followed by a stuttering tick-tick, tick-tick. Myka, similarly and resonatingly wound and tense, holds her breath.

Tick. Tick-tick. Tick tick tick tick tick.

TBC


	7. Chapter 7

Tick tick tick tick tick.

Myka hears the sound; the metallic click-tick is huge in her head, resounding, reverberating, louder than it ought to be—she looks back to the porch, but there is no longer any porch. There is a gray, a gray like the dawn they drove through to get to Boone, a gray like the clothes Helena wore as a hologram. A gray, Myka sees now, of non-presence, of receding presence… she had expected an explosion, some kind of violent flinging of herself, or everyone’s selves, back into the past, but what she gets instead is a slow, gray slide backward, an ooze, a slick of time, until she blinks to try to see through the strange coagulation and realizes that someone’s slowly taking the filter off…

She, Pete, and Claudia have arrived at Sykes’s hangar. Pete and Claudia rush in, guns blazing, but Myka is a step behind. They surprise Sykes’s man right as he’s about to stick a needle into Steve’s arm, and Myka knows she needs to get her eyes all the way open and _be here now_ —because Sykes and Tyler Struhl and _Helena_ are out on the runway now, making it onto that plane… but Steve is okay, Claudia is saying it, “Steve, you’re okay; we’re here; you’re okay.” Sykes’s man gets away, but what is clearest to Myka is:

Steve is okay. The past is different.

Pete and Myka get on a flight to Hong Kong.

Myka is dizzy, nauseous; this is the first time she finds herself doing something again, in the full knowledge that she’s done it, lived it, before.

When they are fully airborne, Pete turns to her and says, “I’m having some kinda weird déjà vu.”

Myka says, “I’m… sort of having that too.” She’s afraid to breathe.

Pete responds with, “Wooo! Freeee-kay!” Then he leaps out of his seat to try to wangle early snacks from the flight attendants.

And Myka has no idea if she should be relieved or frightened.

Hong Kong. She remembers this part, remembers finding Helena’s locket, remembers hearing Sykes’s voice, Tyler’s voice, _Helena_ _’s_ voice. But it’s different, too: when she takes a swift look around the final corner, she sees that Tyler isn’t yet in the chair. They are just in time to save him too.

Myka and Pete go in, and they would be firing, but Helena’s already under Sykes’s control, and she’s got a gun pointed at both of them, and there’s nothing Myka can do. Helena fires a warning shot. “That wasn’t me, Myka, I wouldn’t do this,” Helena babbles. “I swear it.”

Myka is so frankly astounded to see Helena alive in front of her, talking to her, that she doesn’t say anything. She just stares.

Helena’s tone becomes more desperate. “Please believe me,” she begs. “Please. He’s controlling me.”

Myka finds her voice. “Of course I believe you,” she says. “It’s all right. It’s _going to be_ all right, I promise.”

“You know,” Sykes says, and he is creepily conversational, “I was going to put Tyler in that chair. But now I think I’ll put you in there instead, Agent Bering. If H.G. Wells is so desperate for you to believe that she wouldn’t hold a gun on you, maybe she’ll be even more desperate to ensure that your head stays in one piece.”

“Wait! Use me instead!” Pete exclaims, and Myka wants to reassure him, to tell him “no, this is the _idea_.”

Sykes smiles at him. “Agent Lattimer,” he says, “even I can see that Ms. Wells here has an eye for the ladies. One lady in particular, at least. She wasn’t at all concerned about what _you_ might think of her using the two of you for target practice.”

Now Helena looks absolutely stricken. And Myka wants even more desperately to tell _her_ “no, this is the idea.”

So, the chair. Myka knows that even though she’s lived once through Helena solving the puzzle, and she _knows_ now that Helena can solve it, she was no less sure then that Helena would save her life. This time, Myka could intervene; she could say “change the rules.” But Helena has to do this on her own; Helena has to understand that she can save Myka, just as Myka, before, needed to understand that Helena could, would save her.

Some things are different, some things the same; some things, Myka can’t sort through differents and sames in a way that makes sense. Peaks of memory are reinforced when they’re repeated: “Wells and Bering, solving puzzles, saving the day,” Helena says; Myka can at last replay those words, and her own “Bering and Wells” response to them. In the crater timeline (she realizes she’s been mentally shorthanding them—crater, awful, Emily, Amy—and the one she’s in now is, for the moment, simply “this one”), she couldn’t go back over that gem of a moment, couldn’t face its being their _last_ moment. In the awful timeline, she’d gone over it so many times, reminding herself that it happened, clinging to it when Helena was gone, hating it after the revelation of Helena in Boone with Nate. Those timelines polluted it, this beautiful moment; now, for as long as this lasts, she has it back in all its purity, all its potential. She is tempted to make it different, tempted to add “and please can we be that for the rest of our lives.” But she feels that that would be a mistake. Too much different, not enough same.

Back through to the Warehouse, back to the rope from the Mary Celeste (Myka supposes she could avoid that, but she does not suppose very hard, not when she knows she will be pressed against Helena for an all-too-brief, all-too-stressful few seconds).

The wheelchair, the bomb, the dhoti, differences, sames. Myka hides her foreknowledge better than Artie did, in the awful timeline; not once does Helena ask “but how do you _know_.”

What Helena does ask, afterwards, as they all stand together, dazed—after Tyler has been secured and there have been assurances from Claudia, Steve, and everyone else at home that everything is fine—is this: “Artie, why do you have Caturanga’s pocketwatch?”

The watch has been peeping out of his pocket; Myka saw it, almost _waved_ to it, but she was just as happy to keep their… association to herself. Keep their relationship a secret. The irony is not lost on her.

Artie splutters, if someone so exhausted can splutter, “It’s not… what? It’s _Cook’s_ pocketwatch. And _he_ got it from… wait. Something’s happened. Myka, what’s happened?”

Myka wonders if she and the watch are somehow reaching for each other. “Why are you asking me?”

Artie says, “Because of the original owner of this watch.”

“What do I care about James Cook?”

Artie sighs. “I should have seen this coming. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.”

“See what coming?” Helena demands. “What does Caturanga’s watch, even if it did once belong to Cook, have to do with Myka?”

“It was Vitus Bering’s watch,” Artie says. He seems almost physically pained by having to say Myka’s last name. “And he gave it to Cook. Who then made the mistake of going back to the Hawaiian islands at the wrong time.”

Myka and Helena, simultaneously: “But what does that have to do with—” and then they bifurcate: “me?” asks Myka; “Caturanga?” asks Helena.

Myka says, “No, wait, I know that one. Helena, this watch. Part of this watch, I think, he took and hid, with other clock parts, on a bracelet. Which he gave to you.”

“He did give me a bracelet,” Helena says.

“Right?” Myka says. “To remind you. Of time and how we can’t control it.” Everyone is going to find out, she tells herself and the watch. Everyone is going to find out anyway. It’s better that you tell Helena. It’s better to be honest from now on. “I think he did it because he thought you would try to use the watch, and he wanted to make that impossible.”

“Use it?” Helena says. Her voice is sandpaper.

“Use it,” Artie says. “I see.”

Pete puts his hands over his ears. Myka doesn’t blame him at all.

“Use it,” Myka affirms. “To. Okay. To turn back time.”

“That is impossible,” Helena says evenly. “We all know that.”

“I used to know that, but I know something different now, because I did it.” Myka has a sick feeling about what’s coming next. And then it comes, like she’s been backhanded:

“You’re lying,” Helena says.

“No,” Myka says. And _no_ , Myka thinks. _No_ , how can things go wrong here too? How? She looks at the watch in Artie’s hand. This is supposed to be right! she screams at it in her head. She wants to grab it, interrogate it. Instead, she looks at Helena. She remembers this look in Helena’s eyes, she thinks, from the awful timeline. She remembers this expression from the plan timeline. This is Helena disengaging. This is Helena becoming someone else. This is Helena becoming someone else because a different skin is a safer skin. “Not this fast,” Myka says without thinking. “Please, if you’re going to leave me again, don’t do it so fast.”

Then she thinks. “Or do it exactly this fast,” she says. “Do exactly this, and do it exactly this fast: take the watch. It works now. Take it, and use it, and go all the way back.” Myka snatches the watch away from Artie and holds it out to Helena.

Now Helena’s face is like Yellowstone: it says something like _why would you tell me to do this thing_? And: _what is the way out?_  

“Take it,” Myka says again.

TBC


	8. Chapter 8

She can become so _feral_ , Helena can. One moment: so learned, so sophisticated, but then in a cornered instant: wounded, snapping.

Her left hand moves toward the watch Myka holds, then away: up, then down. Up, then down.

The sinister hand.

Myka had imagined that this, that this part _especially_ , would be wonderful, easy. That everything would fall into place. That she and Helena would both finally know, finally see, finally feel all of it. Just in time.

She looks down at the watch in her own hand. Her own sinister hand.

Gently, gently, she raises her right hand. The dexter hand. She touches Helena’s left hand, takes it in hers, pulls softly, raises its weight to her mouth. She kisses its palm. Then she puts the watch in that palm.

She looks up at Helena and her thoughts stumble, just for a moment, over the inscrutable beauty of that face. Myka tells her, “I had no idea something like you could exist. But you do. And there has never been a time, or a timeline, when I didn’t love you.”

Helena stares at her. She looks down at the watch in her kissed, sinister hand. “It’s a gun,” she says.

“Why?” Myka asks, although she knows perfectly well.

“Because it will kill you.”

“Maybe not.”

“It may, and I would not even know,” Helena says. “Because there is one thing I do know. One thing. It is that if this can be done, if I do this, we will never meet.”

“I know that too,” Myka says. She gathers herself. She has to say this. She has to make sure she isn’t being selfish. “But maybe we met just for this. Maybe we met so that you could finally save your daughter, so that you could… I don’t know. Invent the other things you would have invented. Write the other books you would have written. Be yourself, _then_ , for the whole life you would have lived. Maybe that’s why. I knew, when I used the watch, when you were dead—and you were dead, Helena, you _died_ , you died saving us, saving me and Pete and Artie, when the bomb went off, you died and it _destroyed_ me—I knew when I used it that what I wanted, what I _needed_ , was to bring you back. I didn’t think, even once, that the whole point might have been bringing you back… but not _to me_.” She breathes in; it’s a sob. At some point during these words, she’s started to cry.

Helena brings her own right hand to Myka’s face. She brushes her thumb along Myka’s cheekbone. “I seem always to be destroying you. In one way or another.”

Myka leans into the hand. “Not always. Not in this moment,” she says, and she means it. Because Helena is touching her, with her embodied hand; she is not a phantom or a figment or a memory. “Maybe in the moment after this, but not in this one. The experience of this one…” She can almost hear the tick-tick of the watch again, ringing in her head. “You told me, one time, about what Caturanga said when he gave you the bracelet. He said that it was to remind you that time can’t be controlled, only experienced.”

Helena pulls back. “I never told you that.” The words could have been said harshly—they might have been, a minute ago—but Helena sounds genuinely puzzled.

“Not this you. Another timeline’s you. The Amy timeline, when we were…” And then the tick-tick turns into a thunderclap: she isn’t _done_. Whatever Helena decides to do, Helena will do, but she, Myka, isn’t done. “I have to leave. I have to leave right now.” She can’t think clearly: she needs car keys, she needs a phone, she needs to _hurry_. Because she is sure this must be done in time too.

Helena, Artie, and Pete exclaim, in unison, “Leave?!” Helena looks, now, like Myka’s the one who’s done the backhanding.

“Where’s my phone? Oh god, it’s in Hong Kong somewhere. Pete, give me your phone! God, but we haven’t been there yet; I don’t know the number, okay, I’ll find it out on the way if I have to. Give me your car keys! Now!”

Pete stares at her like she ought to be in a straitjacket. And maybe she should, but… all right, she will try to explain it to them. She makes a conscious effort to slow her breathing, and she says, as clearly as she possibly can, “I have one more person to save. We saved Steve, we saved Tyler, and Helena, we saved you, but there is one more person: I have to save Amy.”

“Who,” Helena says with an edge, “is Amy?”

“Here is what we’re going to do,” Myka says. “We are going to get in the car and start driving. And Helena, you are coming with me, because the answer to that question? I think you need to see for yourself. And she needs to see you. Hear you. All of it. And if you still want to use the watch after that, then I will stand back and let you do it. But right now, PETE, GIVE ME YOUR CAR KEYS!”

He digs in his pocket and hands them over. “Whatever’s going on—” he starts, but she stops him with a hug.

“It’s okay,” she says in his ear. “Whatever happens, it’s okay.”

Artie says, “Just come back from wherever you’re going.”

“I will,” Myka tells him. She heads for the umbilicus, tossing a “come on, Helena,” over her shoulder.

Helena starts to protest, “I don’t understand!”

“You don’t have to!” Myka shouts. She doesn’t even bother to turn around. “For now, stop talking and get in the car! This one time, just do what I tell you!”

****

Helena, it turns out, can in fact follow an order; she sits, very quietly, in the car as Myka careers down the Interstate.

The quiet does make a certain amount of sense. What do you say after the earth shatters? Or, better, but bad as well: what do you say after you’ve just barely kept the earth from shattering? What do you say when the earth might be about to shatter again?

You do, Myka decides, what people have always done: tell stories.

Because she might not get another chance. And she has promised herself, over and over again, that she would be honest. So it somehow makes a bizarre kind of sense that as she drives ninety miles an hour from South Dakota through Minnesota towards Wisconsin to save the life of a woman she barely knows, she would confess to her lover of so many lifetimes, her betrayer in almost as many: “I fell in love with Emily Lake.”

Helena twitches. Barely, but perceptibly; Myka could feel the air move. She says, “I thought you disliked cats.”

And Myka laughs. “I do. This was before Dickens. Before she got to Wyoming. And I wasn’t this me, either. That me, that different me, had left the Secret Service after Sam died…”

She tells Helena about Emily. Helena is glad, in a strange but not entirely unexpected way, to learn more about Emily, that stranger, but not a stranger (Myka tries to make that part clear) who lived in her body. Helena is jealous, too, though: when Myka makes reference to the extent and simplicity of her and Emily’s happiness, Helena shifts in her seat and gazes pointedly out the window. She looks a little like she’s doing an impression of a five-year-old who is _desperately bored by_ the romantic interludes in a tale.

Myka omits the part about the cancer. She suspects that that would make Helena angry the way it does Pete, and if Helena’s going to get angry, Myka would prefer that anger directed at her than at some disease. Because this is about the two of them now.

They will reach Boone in not too long; perhaps another twenty minutes. So Myka steels herself to confess one other thing that is a confession: “I told you it destroyed me when you died.”

“Yes,” Helena says. “You did. And I—”

“Let me finish. I did some things to cope with that. Things that… weren’t a perfect response to grief.”

“I would have no understanding of that,” Helena says. Poker-faced.

“I didn’t build a time machine,” Myka says.

Helena laughs. It is bizarrely genuine. “Apparently, you didn’t have to.”

“I guess not,” Myka agrees. “But before the watch. Because nobody knew how it worked, and it seemed for a long time like they weren’t going to figure it out. So I… coped. Or didn’t.” She takes a huge breath.

To Myka’s great surprise, Helena reaches over and puts a hand on her thigh. “Keep your eyes on the road,” she commands when Myka looks at her in shock. “And I just… you’re frightening me. Tell me what you did.”

“I… slept with a lot of women.”

Helena tilts her head. “And?”

“That’s it. Well, and I hit some people and actually did hurt them—not the women,” she adds hurriedly.

“That’s it?” Helena asks.

“Yeah. I was awful; I didn’t care about any of them. I would just _leave_.”

“And this,” Helena says in a sort of strangled voice, “was your terrible response to grief?”

Myka realizes: “You’re _making fun of_ me.”

“I am not making fun of you,” Helena says, then she snorts indelicately. “I may be laughing. But only at the complete lunacy of the situation. Your… dalliances seem perfectly reasonable to me; it is the rest that is so absurd. I tried to end the world as a result of my grief. You, to the contrary, tried to save it. And did.”

Helena’s really gripping Myka’s thigh now, pretty tightly. It’s distracting. “I did what I had to,” she says. “So did you, probably. In each of the minutes. And you have _got_ to let go of my leg.”

“Why?” Helena asks.

“Because,” and now it’s Myka’s turn to sound strangled, “I don’t want to get used to how it feels.”

Helena takes her hand away.

They are quiet again for the ten minutes it takes to reach Boone. Helena looks around as they drive through town. “You _lived_ here?” she says. “Although I suppose if one can adjust to Univille, this is not so much of a stretch. But really, the Boone ‘Culinary Institute’? At least Univille knows what it is.”

“Be careful,” Myka says. She’s starting to lose a little bit of control—too many things are colliding again, too many differents and sames. “A Regent teaches there. That person had a lot of control over your life, sometimes.”

“Emily Lake’s life, you mean,” Helena says.

“Yours, too. I haven’t told you about the awful timeline yet,” Myka warns.

“I’m on tenterhooks,” Helena says. “Boone indeed. This is almost worse than being told I lived in Wyoming.”

“You never had a cat here, either time,” Myka tells her. It’s meant to be comforting, but it comes out pedantic.

“I cannot _wait_ to receive further bulletins regarding my past life. Lives.”

“Alternate, really, not past,” Myka says. Pedantic again.

At least they’ve finally reached Amy’s neighborhood. Myka’s glad she thinks of it that way now, because when she and Pete went to Boone the first time, it had been “Helena’s neighborhood.” And that was too terrible for words. Myka’s glad that this Helena, the one sitting next to her, sounds like she would think so too.

Not too many blocks to go… Myka sees a jogger a few streets ahead. They’re gaining on her, but slowly: black lycra, pink stripes, most likely a woman, yes, dark hair in a ponytail… could have been Helena, if Helena were a runner. Could have been Helena… and Myka feels an echo of that sick, slick veil of time as she realizes, she is _hit by_ , the certainty that this is Amy, that this is the run, that she is alive in this second but she might not be in another—Myka speeds up. They have to get to her. They _have_ to.

“What are you doing?” Helena asks, with alarm.

“That’s her,” Myka grits.

“Her? This Amy person we’re supposedly saving? Then why are you driving like you’re trying to kill her? And us as well?”

“I think,” Myka says, “that it will be important for you to be wearing your seat belt.”

“I _always_ wear it, after that incident with Claudia,” Helena protests.

“Good,” Myka tells her. “Brace yourself.” And as if she’d read the script beforehand, she barrels through a stop sign, catching up with Amy in the middle of an intersection. Helena turns to look out her window at Amy; she has just crossed the street to make her turn towards home, but she had been running against traffic, doing everything exactly as she should. Myka turns to look at the car coming at her from her own left—the one that is going to T-bone the SUV.

TBC


	9. Chapter 9

Myka regains consciousness. She is lying on the ground. She opens her eyes, expecting Pete and Artie and questions like _what happened this time?_ and _did you go to Boone again?_.

Instead, the worried faces she sees are both female. One is Amy’s. And one is Helena’s.

Myka focuses on Helena; the realization that she, Myka, is conscious passes over Helena’s face. “You are an idiot,” Myka hears that blessed voice say. “You could so easily have been killed. When did you become so reckless?”

“You’ve been away a long time. This time. I think,” Myka mumbles. “You’ve missed all kinds of things. You’ll have to catch up.”

“I will,” Helena says.

“I’d like to catch up,” Myka hears Amy say. “I’d like to know what happened. He was going so fast—there was no way he was going to stop in time. And he was headed right for me. I would have—”

“It’s okay,” Myka interrupts. She now perceives things beyond their faces: flashing lights, car parts, ambulance, police cars. “What happened to the driver?”

“He’s untouched, the sod,” Helena says savagely. “The ambulance is for you.”

“I don’t think I need it,” Myka says. She pulls herself upright. Her whole body protests, but she makes it. “See?”

“You are impossible,” Helena says, “and clearly, your judgment is impaired.” But she doesn’t make Myka lie back down.

Myka thinks it would be fine for Helena to berate her like this forever. It is the sweetest scolding she has ever received. Everything else in the picture could fade out, now that her task is accomplished, just as long as Helena stays right next to her, right here in focus, saying that Myka is a fool.

A large police officer approaches them. Myka thinks she might recognize him. “Miss,” he says to Myka, “do you feel up to telling us what happened?”

“Of course,” Myka says. “And it’s agent, not miss.” She levers herself to her knees, then rises to her feet. She is pleased that Helena is standing down for the moment.

“Agent,” the officer says. “Of?”

“Secret Service,” Myka says. She tries to be crisp about it, but standing took a lot out of her.

“Okay. Agent. Bering, your friend said. Agent Bering, could you give your version of the accident?”

“Yes I could,” Myka says. She worked this out in the brief moments before the impact, and she’s thankful to have retained it. “That vehicle was moving erratically, traveling at high speed. This woman was potentially in danger, and I took action to protect her.”

The officer says, “The only thing you could think of doing was using your car—which is pretty much gone, by the way—as a shield of some sort?”

“The only thing,” Myka affirms.

“And you two,” he says, turning to Helena and Amy. “This is how you saw it go down.”

“I’d be dead now if it weren’t for her,” Amy says.

“She articulated her plan to me as she formulated it,” Helena lies. “In fact, she noted the driver’s erratic behavior well before—”

“Helena,” Myka says.

“Oh, all right, if you don’t want me to detail your powers of observation. Fine. But your feat really was quite impressive.” With these words, Helena gazes at Myka adoringly. Myka wonders what in the world is going on.

She gets her answer as the police officer looks from Helena to Myka and back again. Myka can’t tell if he’s uncomfortable or sympathetic, but it doesn’t matter, because he says, “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get this scene processed. Plenty of photos for your insurance, Agent Bering, so don’t worry about that. Then you all are coming to the station tomorrow to give your statements. We’ll charge Mr. Drunk Driver, no problem; he’s lit up like a Broadway marquee. But I want all of you there, first thing. You get me?” They all nod. He nods back. “Now, who needs a ride where?”

It’s determined that because Amy’s house is so near, they will all three go there. “You can sit down, at least,” Amy says, “and I can thank you for saving my life. And my daughter and my husband can as well.”

“That would be great,” Myka says. Anything, at this point, to keep Helena talking to Amy, to get Helena to see Adelaide—and, more importantly, to see what Adelaide wears on her wrist.

****

Explaining the situation to Nate and Adelaide takes a while; they understandably have a hard time processing the idea that Amy has had a real brush with death. (Adelaide is wearing the bracelet. It is almost the only thing Myka can look at. She doesn’t understand how everyone else doesn’t notice where her gaze is stuck.)

Adelaide: “But how did you know he was going to run the stop sign?”

Nate: “Why was there a drunk driver in our neighborhood?”

Adelaide: “How did you know that he and Mom would end up in the same place?”

Nate: “ _How_ fast did you say he was going?”

Adelaide: “Why did you come to Boone anyway if you’re in the Secret Service?”

Helena says, in response to Adelaide’s last question, “Perhaps Myka can answer that one.” She turns expectantly to Myka.

Myka needs cover, and she needs it fast. She starts tapdancing: “I can’t tell you, exactly. As you can imagine. All I can say is that something… no. Someone found something in Boone. Something that needed to be… ah… checked out. Investigated. Or… maybe ‘discovered’ is a better word. So Helena and I—Agent Wells, that is, and I—”

“Wait,” Amy says.

“Wait,” Helena says. She’s the one who pushes forward. “Young lady,” she says to Adelaide, “what is that jewelry on your arm?”

“Why do you want to know?” Adelaide says back.

“Because…” Helena starts. All Myka can do is watch this rerun—no, this _remake_ —of a movie she’s seen before. “No. Please answer my question first.”

Adelaide stares at Helena. Myka holds her breath. Helena stares back at Adelaide. Adelaide breaks first. “Okay,” she agrees. “But if you don’t answer mine next I’ll get upset.”

Amy breaks in. “Excuse me, miss, but that was an ultimatum.”

Adelaide ducks her head. “Sorry. Will you please answer mine next?”

“I will,” Helena says.

“Okay. What’s on my wrist is my time bracelet.”

Helena, who has been standing next to the sofa, sits down abruptly. She breathes at Myka, “How is this possible?”

“Don’t ask me,” Myka says. She hopes the Plumbs will take it simply as an expression of befuddlement; Helena, though, needs to understand it as the directive it is.

Helena understands perfectly, judging from the sour glance she sends Myka’s way. “Fine,” she says. “Adelaide, where did you get this?”

“You said you’d answer my question next. Why did you want to know what it is?”

Helena sighs, almost as if she, too, knows that this scene is not new. “Because I believe I have seen it before.”

“Wells,” Amy says. “Your last name is Wells.”

“Yes,” Helena says. She is sinking back, retreating into the cushions of the sofa. She looks like she wants to dissolve.

“I don’t even need to ask,” Amy says next. “Because I can tell. You’re related to H.G. Wells.”

Helena laughs. Myka can’t hold back a chuckle herself.

Adelaide takes offense. “That isn’t funny! It is a big deal to have ancestors. H.G. Wells was my great great great… anyway, some greats, grandfather.”

Helena laughs again. Then she holds up a hand to fend off further objections. “No, no, darling, you’re quite right. It isn’t funny at all. It is… a coincidence of a rather epic nature. Because yes, I am related to… ah… let us say the historical H.G. Wells.”

“Because you sound exactly like my grandmother,” Amy says, as if Adelaide hadn’t intervened. “That’s how I knew. And he, H.G. Wells I mean, gave her, my grandmother, the bracelet. She was his granddaughter, his oldest son’s child.”

“Gip,” Helena says. “Really. What a funny thing, to think of Gip grown, having children who had children…” She catches herself. “What I mean is, I’ve seen photographs. Old family photographs, of course. Of Gip as a baby, and… others. With that bracelet. Hence my surprise at seeing it here.”

Nate says, “That really is an amazing coincidence. I mean, what are the odds that Amy’s life would be saved by someone related to her?”

Helena says, quickly, “Make no mistake: Myka saved Amy’s life. I was merely a passenger.” She stands up and walks to Myka, takes her hand. “She was astonishingly courageous.”

“I could listen to you for days,” Amy says; she’s in an entirely different conversation. “It’s like having my grandmother back again. Not that you’re that old,” she adds hurriedly.

Helena laughs again. Her fingers tighten around Myka’s; it is, Myka thinks, quite wonderful to share this secret knowledge with her. For it to be a joke of sorts, instead of something to be denied and thrust aside. In this timeline, Helena for the moment wants to be who she is; wants to keep sharing that with Myka. For the moment.

As if on cue, Helena drops Myka’s hand, and Myka immediately feels it as loss. But Helena smiles at her, and… Myka is trying very hard not to get her hopes up.

“Adelaide,” Helena says, “would you mind my examining your bracelet a bit more closely?”

Adelaide is still appraising Helena. “If you hurt it, you are in trouble,” she says.

“Ultimatum,” Amy says immediately.

“Sorry,” Adelaide says. A slight Helena-esque eyeroll accompanies the word. “Will you please promise not to hurt it?”

“I promise,” Helena says, quite solemnly. “It is important, is it not?”

Adelaide nods and extends her left wrist to Helena. Helena gently handles the bracelet, touching its components one by one. “I have spent a great deal of time looking at this bracelet. Ah… in photographs, of course. It is missing a piece,” she says. “Do you see the space?”

Adelaide nods again. “What piece is missing?”

Helena takes the watch from the pocket of her jacket. “A piece from this watch. If I am not mistaken, it is a piece called the crown wheel. The movement of the watch depends upon it. Without it, the watch cannot do what it wants to do.”

“How can a watch want to do something?” Adelaide asks.

Helena answers, “Everything wants to accomplish its purpose. It wants to do what it was made to do, what it was _meant_ to do.”

Myka’s stomach starts to churn.

Helena goes on, “But I believe this watch has accomplished its purpose. And I believe…  I believe that its crown wheel should be returned to its place on this bracelet.” She is not looking at Adelaide now. She is looking at Myka. She is looking pointedly, directly, at Myka.

Adelaide says, “So the bracelet wants to do something now.”

“Yes it does,” Helena says. She smiles at Adelaide. “It most certainly does. It wants to live with you, young Adelaide of the Wells family. It wants to live with you and remind you of what you just reminded me: time passes. It passes, showing us wonderful things and terrible things. Things with which we must come to terms.”

“Yeah,” Adelaide says, echoing Helena’s world-weary tone, “my mom says we don’t get do-overs.”

At this, Myka can’t help but laugh. “Sorry,” she says as Adelaide gives her that suspicious squint. “I’ve been… thinking about do-overs, kind of a lot, lately.”

“Do-overs take many forms,” Helena says. She asks Adelaide, “Do you know whose bracelet this was? At first?”

“Yes,” Adelaide says. She’s a bit pedantic herself. “It belonged to my lots-of-greats grandfather’s sister.”

This staggers Helena hard enough to make her sit down again. “That is… that is correct.”

Amy supplements, “She died young. That’s what my grandmother told me. And that H.G. Wells took it very hard. They weren’t really close—I guess they got on each other’s nerves, like siblings do—but he was devastated without her.”

“Devastated,” Helena echoes.

“Joni Mitchell never lies,” Amy says.

“Exactly,” Myka agrees.

“Pardon?” Helena asks.

“You don’t know what you got till it’s gone,” Myka tells her.

“Oh.” Helena, clearly distressed, pulls at the neckline of her shirt with some force. Almost as if to rend it. “I suspect that his sister never imagined that would be his reaction. I suspect that… she may not have thought about what his reaction would be. At all.”

“I suspect,” Myka says, “that she might do that regularly. With a lot of people.”

Adelaide says, “You’re talking about something else.”

This breaks Helena out of her agitation. She drops her hand and chuckles weakly. “Clever girl.”

Amy looks from Helena to Myka and back again. She looks at her husband. She says, “I think we all probably have some things to talk about. Helena, Myka, can you come back in the morning? I mean, do you have a place to stay tonight?”

Helena looks to Myka, who sighs and says, “The motel.”

TBC


	10. Chapter 10

At the motel, Myka and Helena are given the same room they are always given. Of course. Myka feels her blood move erratically as she enters this room yet again, as she sees the same shabby desk, the battered bureau, the wildly patterned carpet, the dated wallpaper, the crazy-quilt bedspread on the bed. That bed. A blush warms her face, and she tries to hide it by walking over to the glass door that leads to the patio. The same plastic furniture. She looks up to the darkened sky: she sees only a sliver of the moon. At least this moon in Boone is in a different phase. That’s something.

Myka turns back to the room, half expecting to find Helena just behind her, invading her space—no, _ignoring_ her space. But they are not back to any kind of normal like that: Helena has remained standing by the front door. She’s not fidgeting, though; she’s just standing there. So Myka just looks at her.

“Can we be still for a moment now?” Helena asks. “Or are you planning to rush off to rescue someone else?”

“Very funny.”

“Well, how would I know?”

“Okay,” Myka says. “We can be still.” And they are. For a moment. But Myka finds that she can’t stand the stillness, the quiet; she wants to know some things for sure, to get some things said—per Amy, they have some things to talk about. “You really aren’t going to use it?” She tries to say it strongly, to be confident. It doesn’t work… she is out of practice in hoping for good outcomes. Even after all that has just happened just in time, she looks for hope and finds herself wanting.

Helena opens her mouth, closes it again. Opens it and says, “I’ve told you. I don’t like guns. This watch, this gun, is like my rocket: if something is shot blindly, there is no predicting where it will land. What destruction it will cause.”

And Myka doesn’t know if she’s defending herself or playing devil’s advocate when she says, “Sometimes you have to shoot.”

“Yes,” Helena agrees. “But I believe I have at long last learned that when one does not have to, one should not.”

This makes Myka choke. “Should I not have done it?”

“I still don’t know the whole story of what happened,” Helena says slowly, deliberately, “but it seems to me, from what I know, that you were meant to use the watch. You were meant to use it. I was not. You solved the puzzle. You saved the day.”

Myka tells her, because it is the truth, “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“I wasn’t even here.”

“No, I mean without you as _incentive_. At the beginning. I couldn’t, _wouldn’t_ have done it otherwise. And it, the watch, needed me, someone who had been stopped, someone _broken_ , missing a piece, like it was. I don’t think Artie or Pete could have made it work.” This is also the truth, though she worries that it sounds somehow egotistical, so she hurries on, “But then, later, I couldn’t have done it without you as _you_ , because you knew what it was looking for. Only you could _recognize_ the bracelet. It took both of us; we had to work together. Here, in Boone especially, we had to work together.”

“Recognize the bracelet,” Helena repeats. “They have been here in Boone the whole time? Amy and Adelaide?”

“And Nate,” Myka reminds her.

Helena is dismissive; she waves her hand absently. “Yes, him as well.”

But this wounds Myka; Helena is dismissing not just Nate—which is fine—but also the pain that he, and Helena, caused Myka before. It isn’t fair, but she still wants… what _does_ she want? An explanation? An apology? “You need to understand. The biggest reason the awful timeline was awful was that you came here—I don’t know why, probably you were encouraged to, so the Regent could keep an eye on you—and you ended up with Nate. _With_ Nate.”

Helena moves her jaw, uncomprehending. “But he obviously loves his wife so dearly!”

Myka shakes her head. “She was _dead_ , Helena. The accident happened; the accident killed her. You… took her place, I think. As part of that family. I don’t know why you wanted to. Adelaide, mostly, maybe. But you did. You came here, and you stayed here. And I saw you, once, but you didn’t…” She gathers herself. “You didn’t want me. Enough. At all, maybe. I don’t know.”

Still clearly confused, Helena juts her jaw, her chin, sharply again. “What you said, before we left to come here. That there was not a timeline in which you did not love me. I can’t imagine a timeline in which I… in which I…”

“It’s okay. If you don’t want to say it. If you can’t say it. If it isn’t true.” Myka casts her gaze around her. “This motel room. Maybe it’s this room. It does things to us. Good, bad. We start here, we end here. Are we ending again? Even without the watch, are we ending again?”

Helena sighs out, “We should…”

“Okay,” Myka says. She tries to remember what it is like to be made of steel.

But Helena interrupts Myka’s mental preparations with, “Will you let me finish, please?”

Myka jerks out a nod.

“We should,” Helena goes on, “ _if_ all I am ever going to do is continue destroying you.”

“That’s not…” Myka starts. But she needs to make this _clear_ to Helena. She has never really made this part clear. So she says, “I would rather be destroyed over and over again, every single minute, as long as you are with me. I would rather have that than be destroyed once, in just one minute, by your leaving. If it’s my choice. But it’s not my choice. I can’t control you.”

“What a funny thing to say. You are the only one who can.”

“But I don’t want to.” This is something else Helena needs to understand, something else Myka needs to be absolutely clear about. “You make your own choices now. You. Not the Regents, not Mrs. Frederic, not Artie. And definitely not me. I would give you one of Adelaide’s ultimatums, if I could. Tell you the dire consequences. If you stay, if you leave… at least if you leave this time, I’ll get to tell you goodbye. That’s different. Sometimes. Not different for here. I’ve told you goodbye here.”

Helena runs a hand through her hair. “It is difficult to listen to you talk. This time, that time. Here, there, then.”

Distracted by the hand, by the hair, Myka says, “I don’t know how to be in one time or one place anymore. In only one time, only one place. I remember too much.”

Improbably, this makes Helena laugh. “There are so many Mykas inhabiting your mind,” she says, with an almost indulgent smile.

Myka laughs with her, though it isn’t funny. “Lots of Helenas too.”

To which Helena replies, oddly urgently, “But listen to me: there is only one Myka standing here. There is only one body that is Myka.” Now she backs off, takes a more conversational tone. “Do you know the times when I most felt my own historical past and present collapse into something that could be… accepted, managed? When I did not feel in some way bifurcated? The times when I felt my own two timelines, as it were, converge?”

“Um, no?” And she really doesn’t know. It sounds like philosophy, and when have they ever had the time for that?

Helena begins to move through the room. She picks her way past the dresser, navigates between the bed and the desk. Somehow she does this without taking her eyes off Myka’s. Now she’s in front of Myka, and now she does invade her space, like she always does, like she doesn’t even know the boundaries are there. It’s all one smooth movement, and Myka is surprised but not at all surprised when the movement continues, when Helena leans up, reaches up, and places her lips on Myka’s. It’s a determined kiss, a deliberate kiss. It doesn’t feel like romance, this kiss. It doesn’t feel like sex. It feels… it feels like the past. Like something is gone. And Myka is terrified, now, that that is what it is.

The motion continues as Helena just as smoothly pulls back. But Myka sees something different, something shaking, in Helena’s eyes as she says, “There is only one of me. _I_ did not leave you for Nate. Yes, I have done terrible things. I know that they were terrible. But the terrible thing that I will _not_ do, now, is leave you. Make no mistake: I fear you, Myka. I fear the power you have over me. But I also know the power of… what did Adelaide call it? A do-over. You have had many; _you_ have done things over and over again. But this one is _ours_. I am here too. I am here, and I intend to show you that you are whole, you are sound, that the past, the _pasts_ , all your remembered pasts, are just that.”

Myka is reeling from hearing Helena say she won’t leave. She can barely say one word: “H-how?”

“By making you forget yourself.” Helena smiles. It is so sweet, this smile. “Don’t you remember this?” She kisses Myka again—and there is more there, somehow; something is reviving. “And this?” Again, one more kiss—and there is still more in it, and Myka can barely breathe, can barely form a thought. “And how we would both forget ourselves? Forget our _selves_ , and remember only one thing: our bodies, how they move, how they want. Do you want me still? You said that you love me. But do you still want me?”

Myka catches Helena’s face in her hands. Catches her face. Holds her face. And then lets go: lets her hands drop, drag, catch, pull, just _on_ her body, not _doing_ anything, just _there_. “Not a time,” she murmurs, “or a timeline, I didn’t want you. Didn’t want this. But I can’t believe that you would—”

Helena almost rolls her eyes. Almost: Myka sees her stop herself just in time. Yet she still, or again, sounds like the woman Myka first fell in love with, so long ago, when she says with just a touch of exasperation, “There is no need for _belief_. There is _evidence_.” She takes Myka’s right hand in her left. She pulls up her own shirt, almost up to her neck. She places Myka’s hand against her now-bare heart. “Do you feel that?”

“I do.” Helena’s skin, radiating so much heat…

“It beats,” Helena says. “This body is alive.” She lifts Myka’s shirt up now, puts her own right hand over Myka’s heart. “So is yours. Forget all the rest of it. The lives, the lifetimes. Forget them.” She yanks Myka’s body against hers, brings their mouths so, so close together, speaks in that almost subvocal husk. “Forget yourself.”

And Myka does. She feels only, and thinks only of, Helena’s mouth on hers, hers on Helena’s, their hands everywhere. For once, it is just this simple. Helena is right: there is freedom in being just this body—there is freedom, and then the twist upon it, the idea that being caught, caught and entangled in Helena’s body, that, too, is freedom…

After long, full hours, they sleep. They sleep well, in this room in Boone, after this new first time. This renewal. And this time, in the morning, this morning after this new first time, so much is different. One thing is the same: they begin with soft hellos. But they are not awkward. They are not confused. They love each other.

Myka Bering does not live in Boone, Wisconsin. But this morning, she is happy there—happy as she has not been since several lifetimes ago.

~~~~

(So here it ends, pretty much. I think there will be a coda, maybe, probably, because there are a couple remaining plot cats to herd, but I have no prediction as to when that will happen. There are also a couple of other extra pieces that folks on tumblr requested, and those will show up soon.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original tumblr tags on this final part: bodies are very important, remember Sleeping started with Myka wanting to be only her body?, I love to close a circle


End file.
